Google AI Overviews Are ‘Nail in the Coffin’ for Blogs: LTK Founder

For the last 24 hours, Apple’s newly unveiled artificial intelligence features have sucked up much of the oxygen in the room when it comes to tech headlines (more on that here). As many journalists remarked, Apple is playing catch up to some of its rivals, notably Google, whose AI-infused products have been in the wild for months. That’s enough time for creators to start worrying about how the new features could hurt their livelihoods.

Their biggest beefs are with Google’s AI Overviews, or the Gemini-powered blurbs that appear at the top of a Google query and present condensed information from across the internet. These have yielded some embarrassing blunders over the last few weeks, ranging from harmless advice on gluing cheese to pizza to answers that trade on conspiracy theories, such as erroneously stating that former President Barack Obama was Muslim. 

Google has said it would add guardrails to prevent such inaccuracies. But a more fundamental issue with the feature continues to nag creators: Since AI Overviews summarize all information relevant to a search query, effectively eliminating the need to click on links below, bloggers are left wondering whether traffic to their blogs will evaporate.

“It’s the nail in the coffin for future creators launching a blog,” Amber Venz Box, co-founder and president of social shopping application LTK, told The Information. Venz Box said she noticed online traffic shifting away from traditional blogging in the 2010s, an impetus for founding LTK, which allows creators to post content and link out to retailers in the application.