Google is abruptly changing the game for journalism — again ... After years of being courted by tech companies and encouraged to provide content optimised for their platforms and websites, news sites are increasingly finding themselves locked out and denied access to their users.
This is sometimes presented as a media industry issue, as a story about news sites outflanked by changing technology.

But it's about much more than that. News sites are the canaries in the coalmine.

This is about the biggest change to the web in 20 years, one that will affect how you access information and what you read and watch...

... The two best examples of this trend are the choices made by Meta and Google to sideline news site content and referrals.

Just under a decade ago, Meta abruptly changed its algorithm to show less news content on the main feed, beginning a process that culminated a year ago, when it announced it no longer wanted any news content.

Now it looks like Google is doing something similar.

Google has built an AI model partly trained on news content (which it initially took for free, without asking) that's able to answer many user queries and therefore avoid having to direct them to the sites themselves.

As a result, search traffic to news sites appears to be tanking.

This week, Google went one step further, rolling out the advanced search tool AI Mode to Australian users, which will further sideline news sites and embed the shift from "search engine" to "answer engine" ... (read on)