For more than two decades, a simple handshake has shaped how people find information online. It works like this: Web sites allow Google’s Web crawler to index their content so it can appear in search results. The Web sites get traffic, and Google gets to be Google — one of the most valuable companies on Earth, on account of organizing all this information, putting ads alongside it and building lucrative tools on top of it all.
What happens when one half of that bargain disappears?
That was on my mind on Tuesday last week when Google unveiled “AI [artificial intelligence] Overviews” at its annual developers’ conference. It is an unassuming name for a hugely significant update to its search engine, one that — if it works as intended — could significantly reduce the amount of traffic that Web sites receive.
AI Overviews builds on something Google has been doing for a while, but takes it significantly further. Many would be familiar with what happens when they search for a celebrity’s name. Before the “organic” list of search results, the user is presented with a fact panel that pulls in information from sources — typically Wikipedia — to provide basic information without needing to visit the Web site containing the source material.
Soon, AI Overviews would step in for a far broader array of uses.
On stage, Google Search head Liz Reid described how information on movies, travel, books “and more” would be served.
A video demo showed a person asking Google “Why does my candle burn unevenly?” It quickly showed a paragraph’s long explanation and solution. No more clicks needed.
Google did not write that information — someone else did. Or, more likely, a number of people did; their expertise has been synthesized into one clear answer. The AI-powered panel does contain links to related content on the Web, for sure, but there is often little reason to click it. It is efficient for the user and certainly good for Google, but the handshake has been broken.
Rolling out in the US this week, and in much of the world by the end of the year, AI Overviews is a troubling development for the wider Web economy. Think of Wikipedia as a canary: When Google started sourcing its information directly in search results, traffic plummeted because of what analytics firm SimilarWeb called the “zero click” effect — users obtaining the information they were seeking without needing to click through to the source.
Every “zero click” is a blow to Web publishers. Already suffering from a huge drop in traffic from social media companies less interested in carrying current affairs, publishers would be similarly deprioritized by Google, as it strives to compete head-on with know-it-all AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The outlook is bleak: Gartner predicts a 25 percent drop in search engine traffic by 2026, an estimate that seems conservative.
Publishers are expecting to be “bludgeoned,” a search engine optimization expert told the Washington Post.
For its part, Google disagrees with this assessment.
“We see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional Web listing for that query,” Reid said in a blog post.
However, that says nothing of the impact to other links that would typically appear on a search results page, but would now be pushed way below AI content.
Google realizes that to have content to build into AI, content creators must have an incentive to create it in the first place, so the company would be closely monitoring the effect AI Overviews has on traffic, a Google spokesperson said. How much the public would know about these metrics is not clear.
What Google is essentially selling is a cleaner, simpler way to use the Internet, one that strips away many of the modern Web’s annoyances and just gives users the information they are seeking. Everyone might welcome that, but it has to be acknowledged that the big reason much of the Web is a mess is because of Google. For years, Web sites have scrambled to please Google’s ranking algorithms, cramming articles with keywords, employing little tricks — some innocent, others not — to give content the best shot of rising to the top, because winning on Google means surviving.
AI Overviews is Google cleaning up its own mess, but it is a blow to content creators in the age of AI.
Dave Lee is a US technology columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News.
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