AI search summaries cannibalise academic publishers’ web traffic

Scholarly publishers must highlight the “blood, sweat and tears” that researchers expend in producing original and robust content as readers increasingly turn to artificial intelligence-generated summaries of studies, a conference has heard.

Speaking at the Academic and Professional Publishing Conference, part of the London Book Fair, Oxford University Press (OUP) product strategy director John Campbell explained how the launch of Google’s AI-powered search summaries had led to a 19 per cent drop in click-through to academic reference services.

Discussing what he called the advent of “zero-click journeys” for academic publishers, Campbell explained how half of all Google keyword searches likely to surface information within OUP’s own platform, Oxford Academic, now appeared with an AI-generated description next to them.

In this context, investment in traditional search platforms might be seen as having a “terrible return on investment” but the hit-and-miss nature of these AI descriptions – often producing inaccurate and potentially inflammatory material – highlighted the importance of applying “the core principles of what [the publishing industry] built in the first place”, Campbell explained.

For instance, a infamous Google AI search falsely claiming that Barack Obama was the first Muslim president of the US, partly based on misconstrued a headline from an academic paper could be correctly understood if citations to the original article was presented, said Campbell.

With this kind of error now common, it was increasingly important for publishers to link summaries “back to the original author” and explain “how we relate [summaries] to the blood, sweat and tears that happen in the lab”,  he said, adding it was admittedly “hard to define and tell…the transformative story about the research [process]” .

Speaking to Times Higher Education at the event, Campbell said publishers should “expect the way that most people get basic facts will change” but that publishers were still crucial for more in-depth inquiries that would establish the “grounds for truth”.

“The industry needs to tell the story of research better – what research is and what the research process is,” he said.

In this regard, publishers needed to evidence more clearly the impact of research publication – a role now performed by Sensus Impact, a product launched by OUP in collaboration with tech firm Silverchair last year, which provides information to funders about a publication’s reach, impact on future research and societal impact including attention metrics.

“We need to show staff are having an impact, using different types of metrics” he said. “Publishers shouldn’t leave this to others – they need to be in the middle of the spider’s web when it comes to impact.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com