AI is killing review sites. Can they fight back?

AI is becoming a big part of online commerce. Referral traffic to retailers on Black Friday from AI chatbots and search engines jumped 800% over the same period last year, according to Adobe, meaning a lot more people are now using AI to help them with buying decisions. But where does that leave review sites who, in years past, would have been the guide for many of those purchases?

If there’s a category of media that’s most spooked by AI, it’s publishers who specialize in product recommendations, which have traditionally been reliant on search traffic. The nature of the content means it’s often purely informational, with most articles being designed to answer a question: “What’s the best robot vacuum?” “Who has the best deals on sofas?” “How do I set up my soundbar?” AI does an excellent job of answering those questions directly, eliminating the need for readers to click through to a publisher’s site.

When you actually want to buy something, though, a simple answer isn’t enough. Completing your purchase usually means going to a retailer (though buying directly from a chat window is now possible—more on that in a minute). But it also means feeling confident about what you’re buying. The big question is: Do review sites still have a part to play in that?

The incredible shrinking review site

If they do, most media companies seem to acknowledge it’s a significantly smaller one. When Business Insider announced its strategy shift earlier this year amid layoffs, it said it would move away from evergreen content and service journalism. In the past year, Future plc folded Laptop magazine, and Gannett did the same for Reviewed.com. And Ziff-Davis—which operates PCMag, Everyday Health, and several other sites focused on service journalism—sued OpenAI earlier this year for ingesting Ziff content and summarizing it for OpenAI users.

The decline of the review site is somewhat incongruous with a statistical reality: 99% of buyers look to online reviews for guidance, and reviews influence over 93% of purchase decisions, according to CapitalOne Shopping Research. That doesn’t mean buyers are always seeking out professionally written articles (there are plenty of user reviews out there), but the point is readers want credible, reliable information to guide their purchases, and well-known review sites (e.g. The Wirecutter) appearing in a summary can be a signal of that.

And it does appear that AI summaries will favor journalistic content over anything else. A recent Muck Rack report that looked at over one million AI responses found that the most commonly cited source of information was journalism, at 24.7%.

It’s nice to be needed, but does that lead to buyers actually making purchases through the media site—a necessary step for the site to receive an affiliate commission and the primary way these sites make money? Again, the buyer needs to click somewhere to buy their product, and from the AI layer they have three choices: 1) a retailer, 2) a third-party site (which includes review sites), and 3) the chat window itself.

Why nuance still matters

Obviously, it’s in the interest of review sites to steer people to No. 2 as much as they can. When Google search was the only game in town, that meant ranking high when people search for “The best pool-cleaning robots” (or whatever) and hope you were the site that ended up guiding them to the retailer. With AI, the game is similar, but the numbers are different: Fewer people will come to your site, but data points to them being more intentional and engaged. They’re not opening multiple review sites and selecting their favorite—AI is doing that for them. ChatGPT even has a mode specifically for shopping.

To improve the chance of a reader choosing to go to your content over a retailer, what appears in an AI summary needs to convey unique and valuable content that they can’t get from just a summary. That means being thoughtful about “snippets”—the bits of the article that signal to search engines to prioritize. Test data, side-by-side comparisons, and proprietary scoring can all suggest nuance that someone might need to click through to fully appreciate. Taking things a step further, publishers can create structured answer cards meant to be fully captured in AI search, with a simple, concise claim plus a “view full test details” link.

Rethinking the business model

Regardless, even if a review site does everything right with SEO, schema, snippets and all the other search tricks, a large portion of readers will either go directly to retailers, or buy the item directly from chat now that OpenAI and Perplexity are both offering “Buy Now” widgets. However, whatever recommendations the AI makes still need to be based on something, and review sites are certainly part of that mix. That introduces the possibility of a different business arrangement.

The AI companies so far seem totally uninterested in affiliate commissions from their buying widgets, but licensing and partnerships could be an alternative. You could even imagine branded partnerships, where the widget explicitly labels the buying recommendations are powered by specific publications. That would lend them more credibility, leading to more purchases—and bigger deals. With AI-ready corpora like Time’s AI Agent, licensing the content could be a plug-and-play experience, potentially offered across several AI engines.

AI changes the rules, but not the mission

Gone are the days when a publisher could simply produce evergreen content that ranks in SEO, attach some affiliate links, and watch the money roll in. But the game isn’t over, it’s just changed. Avoiding or blocking AI isn’t the answer, but simply getting noticed and summarized isn’t enough. The sites that survive the transition to an AI-mediated world must become indispensable for the part of the journey AI is least suited to own—providing information that’s comprehensive, vetted, and above all, human.

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