A new report by content licensing platform TollBit reveals that AI search engines like those from OpenAI and Perplexity send 96% less referral traffic to news sites compared to traditional Google search. According to Rashi Shrivastava’s article in Forbes, AI companies scraped websites 2 million times on average in Q4 2023, with each page scraped about seven times. Publishers are facing significant challenges as their content is used without adequate compensation. Chegg CEO Nathan Schultz, whose company is suing Google over AI-generated summaries, told Forbes “it’s time to say no” to these practices. The report also found that Perplexity continues to access blocked sites, potentially using unidentified web crawlers.