Google remains focused on its long quest for your eyeballs
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.
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.
