Anja Lambrecht

"If users shift queries away from traditional search engines that direct traffic to a wide range of websites toward LLMs that provide synthesised answers and fewer pathways to external content, the underlying revenue model for content creators may be jeopardised," Lambrecht and her co-authors said in a London Business School article on their paper. The study, accepted at Management Science in 2026, used Comscore clickstream data from 2022 and 2023 and compared early chatbot adopters with people who started later.

Searches fell slowly at first, which the authors read as a learning period, then settled roughly a fifth to a third below pre-adoption levels. Question-style searches declined while navigational searches for a brand or site held steady. The most visited websites kept their traffic, smaller sites lost visits, and display ad exposures dropped most among heavy online shoppers, while search ad exposures did not decline.

"A large share of the digital economy depends on the steady production of high-quality online content, often by smaller or specialised creators," the researchers wrote. If LLMs absorb that traffic, they said, weaker incentives to produce content could affect "information diversity and the long-run health of the web ecosystem." They cited Stack Overflow, whose visits fell after adoption and which has licensed its question-and-answer archive, including for AI training.

They also allowed for the opposite effect. LLMs "excel at understanding complex queries and pre-structuring broad sets of information," they wrote, but can struggle with specific facts and credible primary sources, which could send users on to publishers. In the early data, the paper found substitution and no evidence of that complementary pattern.

Lambrecht worked at McKinsey & Company in Frankfurt from 2000 to 2003. She earned her PhD and a Diplom-Kauffrau at Goethe University Frankfurt and a Maîtrise des Sciences de Gestion at Université Paris-Dauphine, and was a visiting assistant professor at UCLA Anderson and a visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Her earlier research covered retargeting, social media ads aimed at early trend propagators, freemium pricing, and how spillovers between actors in digital markets can look like algorithmic bias. She received the Donald G. Morrison Long-Term Impact Award in 2026, served as an independent digital expert for the UK's Competition and Markets Authority from 2023 to 2026, and is an associate editor at the Journal of Marketing Research and Management Science.