The final speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Merja Myllylahti, whose interest is in changes to how ongoing changes to search engines well beyond AI are changing Web traffic to news outlets. This takes a broader view of audience behaviours in relation to search, and of structural conditions in the search marketplace.
There have been significant concerns about a decline in traffic to news sites; however, the evidence for this decline remains limited at present. Comparing 2018 and 2025 traffic patterns for New Zealand, for instance, traffic from search seems fairly stable; it is the traffic from social media platforms that has declined, and new types of referrers (Yahoo, Wikipedia, Reddit, ChatGPT) are channelling increasing traffic to news sites.
Traffic from ChatGPT remains particularly unevenly distributed, incidentally, since some news sites are blocking its content scraping efforts and in return tend not to be recommended to ChatGPT users. Additionally, now that Google and Reddit have a commercial agreement, Google often refers to Reddit in search results, and Reddit in turn may then refer traffic to news sites as well.
Additionally, the continuing transformation of the creator and influencer economy also means that news influencers take a greater share of audience attention; YouTube is the most important platform for news influences, and this may also explain its rise as a source of subsequent referrals to news sites. With the addition of AI technologies, the attention economy may also morph into an ‘intention economy’.
Similarly, changes to search may create a new ‘answer economy’. As we become more used to receiving quick answers from AI Overviews and similar AI-enhanced search services, however, this also raises important questions about the quality of the answers that such AI services produce; there are already many studies that highlight significant issues with AI-generated answers. Again, such answers may also be more strongly based on social media content than conventional news sources.
Further, the search market will also change further with the launch of a range of Web browsers with in-built AI technologies; OpenAI now has its own Web browser, for instance, as do several other AI services. How do we understand all of these changes – through a lens of market, answer, attention, intention, or creator economy, or all of the above?
