Welcome back to another edition of Content Clout AI
Here is exactly what we are covering in today's edition:
The Click Collapse: Court filings show Microsoft's own data tied AI answers to steep drops in clicks to news sites.
The Citation Shift: Why being cited by AI now matters alongside being ranked.
The Work Lab: Turn two free reports into a one-page AI visibility plan.
The AI Visibility Audit Prompt: A copy-and-paste prompt that finds your most exposed pages.
Read time: 5 minutes.
The Big Story: AI Answers Are Eating the Click, and Now There Is Proof
AI Generated Image
For two years, marketers have argued about whether AI answers would cut into search traffic. This week the argument got evidence, and it came from inside the companies that build the products.
Newly unsealed filings in the New York Times lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI show that Microsoft's own data had its Copilot answer engine cutting click-throughs to the Times' domain by as much as 93% compared with traditional Bing search. A January 2024 Microsoft presentation warned the decline would hurt both its AI models and the wider web. Separately, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT reportedly wrote internally that its products were already substitutes for publisher visits and would become more so as they improve.
