Google search chief talks future of news content amid AI scramble

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Traffic and links remain Google’s core publisher strategy.
• Personal Context is still in internal testing.
• Google acknowledged publisher struggles directly.

Google isn’t ruling out new ways to work with publishers, but traffic and links remain the core strategy. 

When asked whether Google would consider a standardized API or licensing system for news content, Google’s search chief was clear about the company’s direction.”I believe that the core of the way that Google will partner with news organizations and websites overall will be through traffic and links within these experiences,” Nick Fox, SVP of knowledge and information, told me on the AI Inside podcast last week.

Fox’s comments come as publishers continue to grapple with declining referral traffic and an uncertain relationship with AI-powered search. A Seer Interactive study released in September found organic click-through rates fell 61% on queries featuring AI Overviews, with paid CTRs dropping 68%. Separate research from Bain & Company published in February found that 80% of consumers now rely on AI summaries in at least 40% of their searches, reducing organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%.

In September, Google itself filed a court document claiming the “open web is already in rapid decline,” a statement that seemed to contradict what Fox had told me just months earlier at Google I/O, where he declared the “web is thriving” and cited a 45% increase in pages crawled.

Also: Why Google seems to be losing its iron grip on search – and what I use now instead

My co-host Jeff Jarvis came to our follow-up interview with a direct pitch: What if news organizations created APIs to make their content available to AI systems in a standardized way? It’s an idea that Jeff wrote about recently and that has been circulating in media circles as a potential path toward licensing revenue that doesn’t rely on the old traffic-and-clicks model. OpenAI has struck deals with publishers including the Associated Press, News Corp, and Axel Springer. Google has similar arrangements with select partners, but nothing approaching a universal system.

Fox pointed instead to Google’s recently announced commercial partnerships with over 3,000 publications across more than 50 countries, and to features like Preferred Sources, which lets users pin favorite outlets in Top Stories. Google is investing in ways to send traffic, not in ways to license content at scale.

Also: Google just gave you control over your Search results – how to see your favorite sites first

“One of the announcements we made this week was that we’re actually improving the links within our experience, increasing the number of them, as well as increasing preambles for them, because we do deeply believe in that,” Fox said.

But Fox also struck a different tone than he did back in May. When I pressed him on how Google bridges the trust gap with publishers who are watching their analytics decline while hearing executives say everything is fine, he acknowledged the tension more directly than before.

“For sure, there are sites that are struggling,” Fox said. “And for sure, I have empathy for those sites that are struggling. As a company, we care deeply, deeply, deeply about the health of the web. I personally care deeply about the health of the web.”

Fox pushed back on traffic decline studies, saying at least one report attributed losses to AI Overviews that actually occurred before the feature launched. “There was a report of a site that had double-digit decreases, maybe over 50% decrease in traffic, and it was claimed that that was associated with AI and search,” he said. In that case, “the decrease in traffic was before we had even announced AI Overviews.”

Fox maintained that AI Mode, which has grown to 75 million daily active users since its launch earlier this year, represents an “expansionary moment” for both search and the web. Users are asking longer, more complex queries, he said, with question length increasing two to three times compared to traditional search. In other words, AI is creating new kinds of searches that didn’t exist before, growing the overall pie rather than simply cannibalizing existing traffic.

Personal Context is still coming

One of the more interesting features Google teased at I/O was Personal Context, the ability to pull from Gmail, Drive, and Docs to deliver hyper-personalized responses. It was positioned as a flagship capability, the kind of thing that would differentiate Google’s AI search from competitors like Perplexity and ChatGPT’s search features. Seven months later, it’s still not here.

“This is an area we continue to work on,” Fox said. “It’s important that we get it right. It’s important that we do this in a way that’s actually useful. And again, we need to get the user permissions right with this. Some of us are testing this internally and working through it, but still to come in terms of the public rollout.”

Also: Sick of AI in your search results? Try these 8 Google alternatives

Fox was more forthcoming about where AI Mode is finding traction globally. Beyond strong adoption in the US, he highlighted “really strong resonance” in India, Brazil, and Indonesia.

He noted that markets without robust local content benefit from AI search because it can pull from sources across languages and regions to provide answers that traditional search couldn’t surface. “It sort of becomes cross-language, cross-border, and you’re able to provide a response, you’re able to provide a link that might not have been available specifically in that market.”

It’s a revealing look at how AI search can fill gaps where local content doesn’t exist. Whether that’s good news for local publishers and creators in those markets, who now face competition from AI-synthesized answers drawing on content from elsewhere, is an entirely different question.

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