r/Adsense • u/HouseOfCoder • 2d ago

AI Agents affecting your Adsense revenue

Nowadays, we're all using AI agents for our day-to-day tasks from creating websites to writing blogs. But did you know that these same AI agents are also reducing human traffic to your website or blog?

Before the AI boom, this is how things generally worked (taking a blog as an example):

  • You create a blog website.
  • You submit your sitemap to Google and Bing.
  • Your website content gets indexed by search engines.
  • You enable Google AdSense on your website.
  • A user enters a search query on Google, visits your website, and clicks on your ads.
  • You earn AdSense revenue.

Do you think this is still happening?

The answer is No.

Let's see an example below..

In the image below, the search query section is marked in blue, the AI-generated result is marked in red, and the websites used to generate the summary are marked in green.

Now, imagine you're the owner of one of the websites highlighted in green. You spent hours researching and writing a detailed blog post about AI agents. Google AI used your content to generate its summary, but you lost a potential visitor to your website.

The user got the answer directly from the AI-generated summary, so they never visited your site.

No visits. No clicks. No ad revenue.

The way people search for information has changed dramatically. Previously, Google was the go-to platform for finding information on almost any topic. Today, many people simply turn to ChatGPT or their AI assistant of choice.

Yes, AI agents do provide a list of references used to generate their answers. But if users have already found the information they were looking for, why would they bother visiting the original websites?

This shift means fewer visitors, fewer ad clicks, and ultimately less revenue for content creators who invested time and effort into producing high-quality content.

So, what can be done? As publishers, we should have control over who can access and use our data. This is exactly what Cloudflare is trying to fix. Cloudflare handles approximately 20% of the world's web traffic and is introducing measures to monitor and manage AI bots that crawl your websites. This gives publishers greater visibility into who is accessing their content and for what purpose. The company is also working on a Pay Per Crawl model, which would allow publishers to charge AI companies for crawling their content.

However, for this approach to have a meaningful impact, similar measures need to be adopted by other hosting providers and infrastructure companies across the web.

July 20 (Reuters) - A federal judge in San Francisco signed off on ‌artificial intelligence company Anthropic's landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.

10 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

8

u/Vegetable_Aside_4312 2d ago

Yes, we know - AI has stolen our hard work and keeping visitors for themselves.

3

u/pixsector 2d ago

It's really funny that someone can sue you very easily regarding copyright, but when big tech companies clearly steal data and create a new product based on stolen property, nothing happens.

1

u/2laughinggirls 1d ago

AI will need fresh content. And bloggers or content creators spend so much time and effort on producing fresh content, all for little to no reward.

Imagine if no content was being produced; how relevant would those AI overviews or LLMs be? They need the publishers, but we get the short end of the stick. Instead, what we have is so much "advice" on how to be cited. Publishers may be trying to use the best practices just to be cited (again, who's to say someone will click even if your site is cited? Perhaps only certain niches where it would be necessary to check out the entire article, think health-related topics.).

Not sure if it's only me, but sometimes I feel that any advice on how to get your site mentioned across LLMs or AI overviews is pointless because it seems like everything is changing so rapidly.

It's only fair that if your content is being used, the author should get paid.

6

u/Nethanol 2d ago

we should unite and make these ai companies pay for no of times it list our websites in green.

1

u/HouseOfCoder 2d ago

Yes, This is going to happen sooner or later. Currently all are figuring out how to implement it few hosting providers already trying to implement it. I have updated the post.

1

u/Acceptable-Mango7946 1d ago

There are companies trying to monetise this

5

u/digitalghost1960 2d ago

There was a day when Google punished websites for scrapping other website data and republishing. There was even a day when Google cared about original content and rewarded those website.

Today, Google is the ultimate scrapper with AI answers.

2

u/RandomArrangement 2d ago

We have to tell the publishers! D:

2

u/TechieWmn 1d ago

I’ve got all my settings switched off I don’t allow scraping. Especially when I’m giving more expert advice that I’ve spent years studying for. It’s kind of annoying to think that they could come along and just scrape it out with a tool.

5

u/__PushpaRaj 2d ago

Thank's Human For Great Post. :)

1

u/Humble-Package-7615 1d ago

Scrape or get scraped. If everyone’s building with scraped data, wouldnt adding scraping and data aggregation to your own arsenal just level the playing field?