Search engines that use artificial intelligence could harmfully disrupt the digital economy, warns a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center.

“[If] AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy,” Benjamin Brooks wrote in a recent article in MIT Technology Review.

“Today, online content production depends on a fragile set of incentives tied to virtual foot traffic: ads, subscriptions, donations, sales, or brand exposure,” he explained. “By shielding the web behind an omniscient chatbot, AI search can rob creators of the visits and ‘eyeballs’ they need to survive.”

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Brooks urged the AI industry to address the issue of content compensation before others do. “The AI industry should use this narrow window of opportunity to build a smarter content marketplace before governments fall back on interventions that are ineffective, benefit only a select few, or hinder the free flow of ideas across the web,” he wrote.

“We have to remember that these new systems, these new business models, are just taking off,” he added in an interview with TechNewsWorld, “but however we respond to these challenges, it’s important that we do so in a thoughtful, measured and targeted way. That’s why industry should take the lead here.”

“The government is now more adamant about regulating content and regulating negotiations than it has ever been before,” he said. “The AI search industry should be paying attention to that. With the additional pressure in the coming years, the industry should move forward and build a smarter solution before the government turns to more blunt solutions.”

AI search effect unclear

So far, the impact of AI search on content creators' wallets is still murky. "It's not clear yet, but there's a strong case to be made that it will reduce traffic to many publishers," says Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media , a website for news, commentary and analysis.

“The evidence is mixed,” he told TechNewsWorld. “During Google’s ‘SGE’ period, there was evidence that organic links were pushed down the page and therefore [were] less visible.” Google’s Search Generative Experience, launched in December 2023, provides insights into search topics using AI.

“However,” he continued, “there was little research on actual click behavior. Google claims that links in AI results get more engagement. We need to do more research on this issue.”

Chris Ferris, senior vice president of digital strategy at Pierpont Communications , a Houston-based PR agency, added that AI search will exacerbate the problem that already exists with traditional search. “Most websites don’t get any traffic from organic search,” he told TechNewsWorld.

He cited research published by Search Engine Land that predicts that organic traffic will fall between 18% and 64% due to AI search.

Mark N. Vena, CEO and Principal Analyst at SmartTech Research in Las Vegas, noted that there is growing evidence that AI-powered search, such as generative AI summaries in search engines, has caused a decline in click-through rates to content provider websites, as users increasingly consume information directly from AI responses.

“News outlets and niche content creators have reported reduced traffic from traditional search sources as AI systems generate comprehensive answers,” he told TechNewsWorld. “While detailed impact studies are ongoing, this trend indicates potential risks to publishers’ ad revenue and visibility.”

“Without a doubt, AI-powered search tools risk reducing traffic to content providers’ websites, potentially undermining ad revenue and subscription models,” he added.

“Without users clicking through to original sources, content creators may struggle to monetize their work, threatening the sustainability of quality journalism and niche content. Balancing AI-driven convenience with adequate attribution and redirection to content providers will be critical to preserving a healthy ecosystem for digital content.”

Eyeball Apocalypse Overblown

Dev Nag, CEO and founder of QueryPal , a San Francisco-based enterprise chatbot, argued that the narrative that AI search will destroy content creation by stealing eyeballs fundamentally misunderstands how content ecosystems have evolved.

“Think about how we transitioned from paid newspapers and centralized TV/movie studios to ad-supported online content,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Each shift brought predictions of doom, but we got a lot more content – and from more content creators – than ever before.

“AI is poised to dramatically expand content reach through better discovery, translation, and personalization. Rather than destroying the content economy, AI search is likely to create a more efficient marketplace where quality content finds its intended audience more efficiently.”

He claimed that the evidence so far does not support the “eyeball apocalypse” story.

“While AI search is changing how people discover content, we’re seeing content creators adapt by producing more focused, high-quality material that AI systems can better understand and distribute,” he said. “The real transformation isn’t about losing eyeballs. It’s about moving from a mass-market advertising model to more sophisticated monetization methods.”

Nag predicted that two primary models would emerge: “content licensing,” where creators get paid to allow AI systems to learn from and reference their work, even if it’s available openly otherwise, like the recent Google-Reddit agreement, and a “value-sharing” system, where AI platforms distribute revenue based on how often they reference and synthesize a creator’s content.

“It is currently possible with RAG-based systems that can provide explicit references – like Perplexity – and can be adapted to systems that are directly trained through sophisticated attribution tracking,” he explained.

“Search engines can do like TikTok and YouTube and share their revenue to build up the creators that feed their services,” added Rob Enderle, CEO and principal analyst at Enderle Group , a consulting firm in Bend, Ore.

“But as AI advances,” he told TechNewsWorld, “it may need fewer and fewer human creators, which will be problematic for this future outcome.”

Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research, a consumer technology advisory firm in New York City, pointed out that AI search is the culmination of something seen over decades.

“Back in the day, long before AI, there was Ask Jeeves,” he told TechNewsWorld. “It didn’t work out that well, but the idea was that rather than having a got a whole bunch of links "You get an answer. In many cases, that's what the searcher wants. It's a better experience to get information up front and not have to piece it together or track it down from multiple sources of information."

The downside of large content offerings

In his article, Brooks was critical of AI companies that strike deals with big media companies to avoid litigation or government intervention. “This policy of selective concession is unsustainable,” he wrote. “It neglects the vast majority of online creators, who cannot easily opt out of AI search and who do not have the bargaining power of a legacy publisher.”

“It takes away the urgency of reform by mollifying the most vocal critics,” he continued. “It legitimizes a few AI companies through confidential and intricate commercial deals, making it difficult for new entrants to obtain a level playing field or equal compensation, and potentially entrenching a new wave of search monopolists.”

“In the long term, it could create perverse incentives for AI companies to favor low-cost and low-quality sources over high-quality but more expensive news or content, fostering a culture of uncritical information consumption in the process,” he added.

At this point in the development of AI search, Sterling said it's still too early to say how the game will work. "We have a lot of assumptions and fears but need to test them and produce real data so we're not working from a place of pure guesswork," he observed.