In the year and a half since ChatGPT’s release, a scary question has been hanging over the heads of major online publishers: what if Google decided to overhaul its core search engine to put more emphasis on generative artificial intelligence – and thus disrupt our activity. ?
This question touches on one of the most fragile dependencies in today’s online media ecosystem.
Most major publishers, including The New York Times, receive a significant portion of traffic from people going to Google, searching for something, and clicking on articles about it. That traffic, in turn, allows publishers to sell ads and subscriptions, which pay for the next wave of articles, which Google can then show to people searching for the next thing.
The whole symbiotic cycle has been going well, more or less, for a decade or two. And even when Google announced its first generative AI chatbot, Bard, last year, some online media executives consoled themselves with the belief that Google would not integrate such erratic and unproven technology into its search engine, or risk spoiling his lucrative research. advertising business, which generated $175 billion in revenue last year.
But change is coming.
At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced that it will this week begin showing AI-generated responses – which it calls “AI Previews” – to hundreds of millions of users in the United States. -United. More than a billion users will benefit by the end of the year, the company said.
The answers, powered by Google’s Gemini AI technology, will appear at the top of the search results page when users search for things like “vegetarian meal prep options” or “Miami day trips.” They will provide users with concise summaries of everything they are looking for, along with suggested follow-up questions and a list of links they can click to learn more. (Users will still get traditional search results, but they will have to scroll further down to see them.)
The addition of these answers is the biggest change Google has made to its main search results page in years, and stems from the company’s desire to integrate generative AI into as many products as possible . This may also be a popular feature with users: I’ve been testing AI previews for months through Google’s Search Labs program, and have generally found them useful and accurate.
But publishers are right to be scared. If the AI response engine does its job well enough, users won’t need to click on links at all. Whatever they’re looking for will be right there on top of their search results. And the great compromise that underpins Google’s relationship with the open web – you give us articles, we give you traffic – could collapse.
Google executives put a positive spin on Tuesday’s announcement, saying the new AI insights would improve the user experience by “simplifying the search process.”
But this research funds a lot of journalism and many other types of online media (fashion blogs, laptop reviews, restaurant listings) without which the Internet would be far less useful. If Google’s AI insights starve these websites of traffic, what will happen to them? What if large parts of the web disappeared completely, what would AI be left to sum up?
Google clearly anticipated these fears and its executives had prepared responses.
In a briefing this week ahead of Google’s developer conference, they said the company’s testing found that users who saw AI previews tended to do more searches and visit a set of more diverse websites. They also said that links appearing in AI previews got more clicks than links shown on traditional search results pages.
Liz Reid, vice president of search at Google, said in a blog post On Tuesday, the company would “continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”
But analyze these answers carefully and you’ll see that Google isn’t saying that publishers’ overall search traffic won’t decrease. That’s because Google can’t really predict what will happen once it starts showing AI-generated previews in billions of search results per day, or how user behavior might change as a result.
Earlier this year, I wrote about Perplexity, an AI-powered “answer engine” that shows users a concise summary of a topic they’re searching for rather than handing them a list of websites to visit . I thought the experience was clearly better than a traditional search engine for certain types of searches and generally gave me more useful information more quickly.
But I was also nervous, because in my own tests of Perplexity, I pretty much stopped clicking on links. In a world where AI can browse the internet for me and paraphrase what it sees, I’ve discovered that I simply don’t need it. And I worried about what would happen if Perplexity users were all like me and got into the habit of relying on AI-generated summaries rather than original sources.
I have the same concerns about Google’s new AI presentations, but on a very different scale.
The perplexity is minimal: only 10 million monthly users in February. Google, on the other hand, has billions of users and represents more than 90% of the global search market. If it makes a change to its search engine that reduces outbound traffic by just a few percentage points, every publisher will feel it.
It’s unclear how big the effects of Google’s AI previews will be. An analyst firm, Gartner, has predicted Web traffic from search engines could drop 25% by 2026. And many publishers are bracing for a double-digit drop in traffic this year.
Maybe these fears are overblown and publishers don’t care. But after Tuesday’s announcement, Google made it clear that it was about to find out one way or another.
