Google Gemini Deep Research May Erode Website Earnings

Google May Erode Website Earnings

Roger Montti published a very interesting article tonight on Google and it’s Gemini Deep Research. The article is a real wake up call if:

• you run a website
• and earn a living through ads and affiliate programs.

From the article:

There’s a compelling theory floating around that Google’s AI agent, called Deep Research, could negatively impact affiliate sites. If true, not only would this impact:

• affiliate site earnings,
• it could also decrease ad revenues
• and web traffic and to informational sites,

including to the “lucky” sites that are linked to by Google’s AI research assistant.

Gemini Deep Research is a new tool available to premium subscribers to Gemini Advanced. Deep Research takes a user’s queries and researches an answer on the web then generates a report. The research can be further refined to produce increasingly precise results.

Google rolled out Deep Research on December 11th. It describes it as a time-saver that creates a research plan and once approved will carry out the research.

Deep Research presents a report that features a summary and recommendations. If searching for a product it will summarize the pros and cons with enough data that a user won’t need to click a link to visit a site, they can just go directly to a retailer and purchase the product, thereby eliminating the possibility of a site visitor clicking an affiliate link from a review website and depriving that informational site of revenue.

It goes on to say:

According to an article by Marie Haynes on YouKnowAI, the thoroughness of the summary generated by Gemini Deep Research negates the need to visit a websites, thereby depriving the site of affiliate link revenue.

Is Gemini Deep Research Harvesting Data Without Giving Back?

There’s an old television episode of The Twilight Zone called To Serve Man that relates the story of a benevolent race of aliens who bring advanced technologies that allow humans to live in peace, with food security and prosperity for everyone. As evidence of their good intentions they give the world a book written in an alien language that’s titled To Serve Man. The episode ends when government cryptographers translate the book and discover that it’s a cookbook and that the aliens true intentions are to farm humans as a food source.

Google’s mission statement promising “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” also seems like proof of their good intentions. However, the mission statement doesn’t explicitly say that Google will refer users to the sources of information. It only promises to organize and provide the information itself in a way that’s accessible and useful. While referring users to the creators of the information could be a part of making information accessible and useful, it’s not explicitly stated; it’s not even implied in the mission statement.

Is Google Gemini Deep Research further proof that Google is harvesting websites as an information source?

If you’re a creator, does it make you feel farmed?

The article is very much worth the read especially if you run websites. I thought how Roger ended the article was very good, showing how Google is out of touch with the web ecosystem.