Google announced this week that it would begin the international rollout of its new artificial intelligence-powered search feature, called AI Overviews. When billions of people search a range of topics from news to recipes to general knowledge questions, what they see first will now be an AI-generated summary.
Google touted AI Overviews at its annual I/O developer conference as a way of delivering customers quick answers and simplifying the online search experience, but it also has another effect on the way that people engage with the internet: keeping users, and advertisers, on Google.com. It’s a new era in Google’s years-long quest for your attention.
“Google will do the googling for you,” said Liz Reid, head of Google Search.
While Google was once mostly a portal to reach other parts of the internet, it has spent years consolidating content and services to make itself into the web’s primary destination. Weather, flights, sports scores, stock prices, language translation, showtimes and a host of other information have gradually been incorporated into Google’s search page over the past 15 or so years. Finding that information no longer requires clicking through to another website. With AI Overviews, the rest of the internet may meet the same fate.
Website owners are understandably concerned. Although Google’s demonstration gave the appearance that its AI could whisk its answers out of thin air, these overviews are built off content from news outlets, cooking blogs, product reviews and other articles that require human workers to write them. All of these sites rely on advertising revenue from people visiting their web pages, something that may no longer happen if users can get a summarized version of a site within seconds of searching.
Google has tried to assuage publishers’ fears that users will no longer see their links or click through to their sites, with Reid stating during I/O that individual articles featured in AI Overviews get more traffic than if they were traditional web listings. The company has not mentioned whether it predicts overall search traffic will decline, however, and research firm Gartner predicts a 25% drop in traffic to websites from search engines by 2026 – a decrease that would be disastrous for most outlets and creators.
Google’s quest to keep you on Google
AI Overviews are the culmination of a long line of products, going back almost two decades to the launch of its customized homepage, that have turned Google.com into its own self-contained online ecosystem. One of its first major advances in the amount of information Google would display on its search page came in 2012, with the debut of Knowledge Panels – boxes of information, usually taken from Wikipedia, that display basic information, photos and biographical details about a person or subject.
Knowledge Panels expanded to the point that Google chief executive Sundar Pichai boasted in 2016 that they contained 70bn facts. Next came other services like stock prices and weather reports that would have previously required users to direct their attention to websites, causing alarm among outlets built around providing such information. When Google began featuring sports schedules on its page in 2013, TechCrunch ran an article titled “Google Embeds March Madness Bracket In Search, Because Screw Sports Sites”.
As Google began to aggregate an increasing amount of information, concerns also grew around misinformation. Knowledge panels sometimes listed living persons as dead or automatically generated people’s job titles, regardless of why they might be public figures – leading to Google calling one of America’s worst mass murderers a “real estate investor”. AI Overviews have already started returning wrong answers.
Google has also expanded so much over the years that at times it’s hard to see the barriers of when its platform ends and another site begins. In 2015 Google launched accelerated mobile pages, or AMP, that loaded articles faster on Google’s platform. Major news outlets quickly began publishing AMP articles, only to find that AMP pages generated far less advertising revenue than their own mobile sites.
Publishers have long been wary of what Google’s strong gravitational pull has done to their reliance on the platform. The growing dependency on its traffic has resulted in over a decade of media companies seeking revenue through search-engine-optimized articles that range from HuffPost’s 2011 classic of the form “What Time is the Super Bowl?” to Bon Appetit’s recent “What is That White Stuff on Your Food?”. Those types of article, created in response to the chase for Google referrals, now seem the most likely to become fodder for AI Overviews.
‘Gatekeeper for the internet’
The potential threat from AI Overviews is especially acute because other major platforms have become dwindling and unreliable sources of traffic.
Facebook’s changes to its news feed have sent reverberations throughout the media industry for years, drastically decreasing traffic to digital outlets and leading them to make major structural changes like the mid-2010s infamous “pivot to video”. Facebook has decreased its algorithmic emphasis on news content to the point that politics magazine Mother Jones experienced a 99% decline in referrals since its peak year, while Meta announced in February it would kill its Facebook news tab for US users. Entire countries such as Canada see no links to news on Facebook.
Other platforms haven’t offered any respite from Facebook’s turn away from news. Twitter, never a large source of traffic or ad revenue compared with Facebook or Google, has become even more irrelevant for publishers since billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform, spurned news content and embraced on-platform viral videos. Apple News has alternatively driven an immense amount of traffic to news sites that work with its app, but publishers have struggled to gain revenue from these partnerships, as most users stay within Apple’s platform.
What’s left for publishers is largely direct visits to their own home pages and Google referrals. If AI Overviews take away a significant portion of the latter, it could mean less original reporting, fewer creators publishing cooking blogs or how-to guides, and a less diverse range of information sources. It would also increase Google’s dominance over what we see when we look at the internet, an issue that is already the subject of antitrust lawsuits from the US Department of Justice that allege the company has illegally monopolized the search and advertising industries.
“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the justice department stated in its 2020 complaint. “That Google is long gone. The Google of today is a monopoly gatekeeper for the internet, and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet.”