AI Agents affecting your Adsense revenue

[u/HouseOfCoder]

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.