Khaberni - Traffic to the top internet sites has decreased by more than 11% over the past 5 years, according to data from "SimilarWeb", in a clear indicator of the challenges facing traditional media institutions in the era of artificial intelligence.
The American site Axios said that despite the continued growth and spread of Internet usage, older sites struggle to keep up with developments, as new experiments based on artificial intelligence begin to dominate user attention.
A quarter of the web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer available now, and 23% of news pages contain at least one broken link
By Pew Research Center
The data shows that these older sites do not disappear suddenly but continue to "erode" on the open web for years, confusing search results and leaving behind trails of broken links or outdated content.
According to "SimilarWeb", internet traffic has remained stable over the past 5 years at about 300 billion visits per month on average, when looking at the total global web traffic for the top 1000 sites, including new sites.
The Axios report concluded that the slow deterioration of older sites has made the internet confusing for users, as well as for the tools trying to collect accurate data to train artificial intelligence models.
A quarter of the web pages no longer exist
While some publishers have sought to maintain their sites and update their experiences, many others have neglected their old sites instead.
Research by the Pew Research Center found that a quarter of the web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer available now.
It also concluded that 23% of news pages contain at least one broken link, the same being true for 21% of government site pages.
Prominent publishers have argued for years that artificial intelligence companies collecting data from their content could eventually push them out of the market, leaving large language models in the future trained only on old content.
The data shows that the referral traffic coming from chat robots based on artificial intelligence to prominent media and news sites is almost 96% less than the referral traffic through traditional Google search.
This concern has prompted some artificial intelligence companies, including "OpenAI", to enter into agreements with publishers to compensate them for their content.
