Excerpt from the linked content^1 by Ryan Joe, Lara O'Reilly, and Lauren Johnson:

>As Microsoft and Google duke it out to control the future of search, the advertisers and publishers who rely so much on search-generated traffic are struggling to figure out how it will impact their businesses.

>"It's possibly the most enormous set of changes in the tech industry since the birth of the web in the '90s," said Paul Bannister, chief strategy officer of CafeMedia, which oversee the ads business for about 4,000 publishers, like Merriam-Webster and the food blog Half-Baked Harvest.

>While both Microsoft and Google are racing to bring AI-powered search to consumers, they have said nothing to either publishers or advertisers about how these tools will impact traffic and ad revenue, multiple sources told Insider.

>Microsoft declined to comment. Google didn't respond in time for publication.

>"It's simultaneously exciting and terrifying," said Chris Schimkat, global head of analytics at the IPG-owned performance marketing agency Reprise Digital.

>"But for a lot of marketers in particular, if this is taking over content writing and image generation, where can we continue to provide value? And that's going to be a pretty prominent question."

> 

>One of the biggest concerns is that if AI-powered search engines provide all the information people need without them having to click through to any websites, it will reduce traffic and ad revenue for publishers.

>Bannister doesn't think AI-powered search will change advertising drastically in the short term, but even small changes can have an impact on business.

>"If it decreases search click throughs by 3%, that's 3% less page views to a lot of sites," he said. "So I think it's right to be worried. But we also want to get the facts and figure out how it's going to work and what are the new opportunities."

>Many publishers are familiar with how their traffic has been chipped away by search engines as they've evolved.

>"We've been dealing with this shrinking search landscape for many years now, as Google and the likes have tried to answer these questions directly within search results," said Kyle Sutton, director of SEO and product at the publisher Gannett, which owns USA Today and local news sites.

>"Look no further than sports scores. You know that used to be guaranteed traffic?"

>Now, when people search for scores or similar types of basic information, Google populates the answer in a module called a Featured Snippet on the search page, Sutton noted.

^1 Ryan Joe, Lara O'Reilly, and Lauren Johnson for Axel Springer’s Insider, 10 Feb. 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-search-war-between-microsoft-and-google-has-the-ad-industry-caught-in-the-crosshairs-2023-2