AI search summaries under fire

A party of Democratic senators, led by Amy Klobuchar, has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate whether AI-generated summaries of online content, such as news articles or recipes, are violating antitrust laws. 

The Democrats believe that while traditional search results provide a link to original content, that would take the reader directly to the publisher’s site, increasing traffic to that site, AI-generated summaries now negate the need for readers to visit third-party sites, as the summaries can often provide enough context and information to keep them on the search results page, instead. 

Many smaller publications are therefore losing traffic and as a result, are having to consolidate and make lay-offs, while the dominant online platforms—like Google—continue to reap the benefits, collecting billions of dollars of advertising revenue from these publications, each year. 

To make matters worse, the only way to stop their content from being used in the AI summaries is to opt-out, which means they won’t get indexed or shown in the search results, meaning they also lose traffic. 

It’s a lose-lose situation for these publications, and that is why the Democrats have written a letter, urging the FTC and DOJ to investigate whether AI search summaries are “a form of exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of the antitrust laws.”