MIZ

Absolutely nothing worse than losing when you should’ve won. Heart wrenching, especially when there were endless opportunities to put a game away with the lead. As a Missouri fan this has been a reoccurring story for 2 1/2 decades. Sure there were some years where this wasn’t true, maybe three or four in total, but this is painstakingly all too familiar.

🚨This is a must read groundbreaking 1,000 participant study exploring the effects AIOs and AI Mode have on the information ecosystem titled: “The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment” by Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen This study has eye opening insights that speak for themselves. Simply put…Google isn’t on a sustainable path. We recommend reading all of it. It is a great read! Here is the full conclusion section because it is well worth reading in its entirety. The link to full study is below👇 “This paper aims to provide evidence on how integrating generative AI into search interfaces reshapes user behavior and the broader digital information ecosystem. Leveraging a field experiment with users in their natural search environment, we isolate the causal impact of AI Overviews on engagement patterns, offering insights that move beyond correlational claims. Our findings demonstrate that the prevalence of AIOs substantially reduces clicks to organic search results, increasing the prevalence of zero-click searches while leaving interactions with sponsored content unchanged. These results suggest that AI-generated summaries primar- ily replace visits to external websites rather than redistribute attention across the search page. Moreover, despite the prominent placement of AIOs, only a very small fraction of outbound clicks on AIO-triggering queries originate from citations embedded within the AIO, suggesting that citation-based referral traffic, and therefore the potential gains from generative engine optimization (GEO), remain modest during our study period. Given that AIOs appear in a significant share of queries, a share that is likely to rise in the coming months and years, their aggregate impact on publisher traffic is likely to be substantial. At the same time, the absence of measurable improvements in user satisfaction or increased engagement on the downstream webpage after a click challenges the notion that these features deliver clear gains to users or downstream publishers. Instead, our evidence points to a redistribution of value within the ecosystem, in which search platforms may increasingly capture user attention – a pattern also suggested by our exploratory AI Mode results, which may foreshadow effects as search environments become more AI-mediated. Taken together, our findings contribute to ongoing debates in platform regulation and digital market design. They highlight a fundamental tension: while AI integration can streamline access to information, it may simultaneously undermine the economic incentives that sustain high-quality content production. Ultimately, as generative AI becomes more deeply embedded in core digital infrastructures, understanding its behavioral and economic consequences will be critical for shaping a more innovative and equitable online information environment.” 🔗Link to study: stackcyber.com/files/google-…

Anyone else getting a lot of feedback and distortion in the UT UT game right now?

BIG news for YouTube creators: Washington is finally starting to treat content creation like the massive industry it has become. Senators Cory Booker and John Kennedy are leading a new bipartisan Creators Caucus, giving creators an actual voice in the conversations that shape how they earn money and protect their work. This industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars, yet creators have had almost no representation where the rules are written. Monetization, taxes, AI stealing people’s likenesses, and the future of online businesses are now officially part of the conversation in Congress. This is a much bigger deal than most creators realize.