As AI kills search traffic, Google launches Offerwall to boost publisher revenue

AI kills search traffic. Yes.

OTOH good search - deep research - is one of the biggest productivity gains using AI.

Until they kill off the content providers who a) rely on that traffic and b) provide the raw material for the models, of course.

And put ads and sponsored results in the LLMs.

Using AI to do research almost seems worse than citing wikipedia as a reference.

And until now had to pay part of their revenue to Google for search results being ranked accordingly. Diversity of ingress vectors may not be such a bad thing.

The same people who cited Wikipedia instead of its sources are probably the same people who cite AI instead of its sources. New scope for people with a stick.