Starting about a week ago, when billions of people search for various topics from news to recipes and general knowledge questions, an AI-generated summary is what they will see first.
At the annual I/O developer conference, Google introduced AI Overviews as a way to provide customers with quick answers and simplify the online search experience. However, it also has another effect: keeping users and advertisers engaged on Google.com. This marks a new era in Google’s long-standing efforts to capture your attention.
“Google will search on Google for you,” said Liz Reid, head of Google Search. While Google used to primarily serve as a gateway to other parts of the internet, it has spent years consolidating content and services to transform itself into the main destination on the web.
Weather, flights, sports scores, stock prices, language translation, movie showtimes, and a range of other information have gradually been integrated into Google’s search page over the past 15 years. Searching for information no longer requires visiting another website. With AI Overviews, the rest of the internet may face a similar fate.
AI Overviews will provide answers based on artificial intelligence.
It’s understandable that website owners are becoming concerned. Although Google’s presentation suggests that its AI can autonomously generate answers, these summaries are based on articles, cooking blogs, product reviews—content created by humans.
All these websites rely on advertising revenue from visitors, which may soon be jeopardized if users can receive a summary version of a website just seconds after searching.
Google has attempted to alleviate businesses’ concerns that users will no longer see hyperlinks or click through to their websites. Reid stated at I/O that the articles featured in AI Overviews will receive more traffic than traditional display methods.
However, the company has not predicted whether the overall search volume will decline. According to research firm Gartner, traffic to websites from search engines could drop by 25% by 2026—a catastrophic figure for most websites and content creators.
AI Overviews are the result of a nearly two-decade-long product line, starting from the launch of personalized homepages, which transformed Google.com into a closed online ecosystem.
One of the first significant advancements in the amount of information Google could display on its search page was in 2012, with the launch of Knowledge Panels—information boxes, often sourced from Wikipedia, that display basic information, images, and biographies about a person or topic.
Knowledge Panels have expanded to the point where Google CEO Sundar Pichai proudly claimed they contained 70 billion lines of information by 2016. Following this were other services like stock prices and weather forecasts—a hurdle for websites that specialized in providing that information.
When Google began including sports schedules on its page in 2013, the online publication TechCrunch ran an article titled “Google Adds Basketball Tournament Schedules to Search, Ignoring Sports Websites.”
As the amount of information Google aggregates increases, so do concerns about misinformation. Knowledge Panels sometimes list living individuals as deceased.
AI Overviews have also provided incorrect answers. Publishers have long been wary of how Google impacts their survival on the platform.
The dependency on traffic has led to over a decade of media companies seeking revenue through search engine-optimized articles, with headlines like “What Time is the Super Bowl?” and “What is the White Stuff on Your Food?” These articles, created for Google recommendations, are now likely becoming sources of information for AI Overviews.
The potential threat from AI Overviews is particularly severe, as they contribute to the decline of other major platforms.
Changes to Facebook’s news feed have repeatedly sent shockwaves through the media industry, significantly reducing traffic to websites and forcing them to pivot to video content in the mid-2010s.
Facebook has limited the prioritization of news content to the extent that the political magazine Mother Jones has experienced a 99% drop in recommendations since its peak, while Meta announced in February that it would remove the news section from U.S. users’ Facebook feeds. Some countries, like Canada, have found no related news links on Facebook at all.
While Facebook has turned its back on news, other platforms have not offered any adequate solutions. Twitter, never attracting the traffic or advertising revenue of Facebook or Google, has become even more irrelevant for businesses since billionaire Elon Musk took over the platform and rejected news content.
Moreover, while Apple News has driven significant traffic to news websites collaborating with their app, publishers still struggle to achieve revenue as most users continue to engage with Apple’s platform.
Now, businesses largely rely on direct traffic to their homepages and Google’s recommendations. If AI Overviews take away a significant portion of the latter, it could result in fewer how-to blogs, leading to less diverse information. It would also allow Google’s empire to continue to expand every time we go online.
“Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a small startup with a creative way to search the emerging internet. That Google is no more. Today’s Google is the exclusive gatekeeper of the internet and one of the wealthiest companies on the planet,” the Justice Department stated in a 2020 complaint.
