A court filing from news publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft quotes an OpenAI software engineer saying, “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.” The New York Times, one of the plaintiffs in the case, reported that the engineer wrote the message in February 2023.
The same filing quotes Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, on the chatbot’s “browse” function. According to the brief, Turley said there was “no good reason to click” on a link to the original source once ChatGPT gave an answer.
Both quotes come from the publishers’ combined summary judgment brief, filed Sept. 17 in the consolidated copyright case in federal court in New York. It’s one side’s argument, and the court hasn’t ruled on it.
The brief also cites Microsoft data comparing click-through rates (CTR) for the publishers’ websites in Bing Chat and Bing Web Search. For The Times’s websites, CTR was 87% to 93% lower in Bing Chat.
Microsoft’s Bing Chat Click Data
The publishers’ brief says CTR was 87% to 93% lower in Bing Chat than in Bing Web Search for The Times’s websites, 83% to 91% lower for the Daily News plaintiffs’ sites, and 51% to 94% lower for Ziff Davis sites.
The filing defines CTR as the percentage of clicks to a URL relative to its impressions, which it describes as appearances of that URL in a search results page or a chatbot’s response. The ranges don’t measure traffic or visits.
The publishers argue the reductions “clearly show substitution.” The same passage says they aren’t required to prove harm with data and that “common sense suffices.”
The passage doesn’t say when Microsoft collected the data, how many queries, impressions, or clicks it covered, or how the data was selected. It also doesn’t say what the low and high ends of each range stand for. Microsoft renamed Bing Chat to Copilot in November 2023, but the product name doesn’t date the data, and nothing in the passage ties the figures to the current Copilot.
Microsoft And OpenAI Dispute The Publishers’ Case
OpenAI and Microsoft argue their use of news content is fair use, and both filed their own summary judgment motions on Sept. 4. Axios reported that OpenAI’s motion cited studies suggesting ChatGPT outputs don’t create commercial substitutes for The Times’s work, and that Microsoft made similar claims about Copilot.
A Microsoft spokesperson told TheWrap the company’s court filings explain “why Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism.” OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Why This Matters
Being cited and being clicked are different measurements. Microsoft’s AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations, and its help page says citation metrics differ from traditional search metrics that measure rankings, clicks, and traffic. When Microsoft added Citation Share in June, it said the metric doesn’t represent traffic share. On Google’s side, Search Console’s generative AI report shows impressions, and as I noted last week, it doesn’t list clicks.
The Microsoft data in the publishers’ filing covers the step after a link appears. It compares how often links to three publisher groups’ sites got clicked in Bing Chat answers and in Bing search results.
When Microsoft added chat data to the Webmaster Tools Performance report in 2023, it combined web and chat clicks and impressions, as I reported at the time. The CTR figures in the filing separate chat from search.
Looking Ahead
Judge Sidney H. Stein’s Sept. 24 order set Oct. 23 for oppositions, Oct. 30 for amicus briefs, and Nov. 20 for replies.
Watch whether OpenAI and Microsoft respond to the engineer quote, Turley’s comment, or the CTR data in their Oct. 23 filings, and whether later filings add context for the messages or show how Microsoft measured CTR.
