I wonder how this affect Google's bottom line.

Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

What is their income source now that they've all but stopped doing that?

Ads in the AI results, obviously. Google is now the king of the the SEO spam website game: plagiarize the info from others, slap ads on it, and profit. That is the purpose of LLMs: end copyright law, but only for the 5 tech companies wealthy enough to run these massive models. The rest of us still have to follow the law, of course.

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marginalia_nu 6 hours ago | parent [-]

But they aren't doing this, are they? How can their ads revenue be constant (as per your sibling comment), while nearly 60% of the traffic is gone (as per the article), before such a scheme has rolled out?

	▲	glenstein 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nearly 60% of traffic is gone from the tech publications, not gone from Google.
	▲	renegat0x0 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		OpenAI was already found to be integrating ads into API. It is only a matter of time. Enshitiffication is inevitable. Google participates in AI bubble. When it pops, they will aggressively seek monetization. Be ready to see chatbot output to be populated with popups, video ads, popups, and stuff.
	▲	jeffbee 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Gemini already drives some really valuable ads. It has, in effect, solved the "best pants" problem. It will use personalized chat to give you attributable shopping links for pants. And they don't have to share that revenue with some SEOmaxxing pants blogger.

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surajrmal 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can see their balance sheet in quarterly earnings reports. Ads revenue has not declined or even come close to it.

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pixl97 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ads to you directly without having to pay a middleman.

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zvqcMMV6Zcr 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Their entire business model was to funnel traffic to websites with their ads.

This doesn't change, they will still show ads somewhere around AI overview. As part of it if it is both technically feasible and legal.

The part of equation that is gone, is how organic traffic got to sites that published quality content. Now they might as well shutdown or switch to hard paywall. Both won't affect Google for few year, until websites (other than shops) are dead, knowledge stored in LLMs gets outdated and search engines have tiny index, that is a shadow of past size.

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NooneAtAll3 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

wasn't there "ad clicking bots" controversy recently?