Google chief executive Sundar Pichai speaks during the tech titan’s annual I/O developers conference on May 14, 2024, in Mountain View, California. – Google on Tuesday said it would introduce AI-generated answers to online queries made by users in the United States, in one of the biggest updates to its search engine in 25 years. (Photo by Glenn CHAPMAN / AFP)
San Francisco, USA—Google’s use of artificial intelligence to summarize answers to search queries has publishers wondering if website traffic will wither.
The internet titan announced Tuesday that it is introducing AI-generated answers to online queries in the United States, one of the biggest changes to its world-leading search engine in 25 years.
The change will soon spread to other countries, arguably reducing the importance of links and web pages for more than a billion people.
Bloggers, news outlets, and others who benefit from people clicking on their links via Google’s search results could see their audiences dwindle if people are sated by what its “AI Overview” serves up.
“It’s going to create a negative impact on brands and publishers who rely on organic search traffic for sure,” Marketing AI Institute CEO Paul Roetzer said of such a scenario.
“We just have no idea how much, and we don’t know what you can do about it.”
AI blurbs generated by Google’s Gemini technology will offer succinct summaries of what it found online with only a few links to the online sources that supplied the information.
Research firm Gartner predicts that traffic to the web from search engines will fall 25 percent by 2026 due to increased reliance on AI in general.
Roetzer noted that Google had not provided much information about how the change might affect advertisers or publishers, asking them to have faith.
“It’s just going to be a grand experiment happening in real-time that will move people’s businesses one way or the other, depending on how it plays out,” Roetzer told AFP.
For now, he added that marketers and publishers have little choice but to keep doing what they are doing
and diversify where they appear online to get noticed in places other than Google searches.
But online audiences have already been splintering as people spend time on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other venues, so Roetzer added that opportunities exist to connect with people there.
Aware of the negative reactions from publishers and content creators, Google executives insisted on Tuesday that the new formula would encourage users to click on a wider variety of websites, not the other way around.
At a press roundtable, Google search director Hema Budaraju promised, “We’re committed to ensuring a vibrant ecosystem.” She said in the new version that “sites receive more traffic” than before.
– AI-journalism opportunity? –
Roetzer said news outlets and other media creators with fresh information could strike deals with Google to license the data used in AI models and earn money.
“There’s a chance that AI, in a weird way, saves journalism because these (AI) model companies need real-time data,” Roetzer said.
“What if these AI companies fund journalism because they need it?”
CUNY Graduate School of Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis said he didn’t blame Google for trying to improve an online search experience that had become “a mess.”
However, he was leery of AI being used in search because “it has no sense of fact.”
Jarvis also advocated that news outlets make deals with AI titans to provide credible current information, saying, “There’s an opportunity here for our industry.”
“If you have unique and credible authoritative information, you might benefit,” he told AFP.
The advertising industry, meanwhile, could take a hit of billions of dollars, according to Jeff Ragovin, chief executive of Semasio.
His company specializes in using semantics to target ads better.
“For businesses dependent on search rankings, the uncertainty surrounding AI Overview is alarming,” Ragovin said.
Still, Media Growth Partners consultant David Clinch said Google relies on ads for its revenue, so it’s not likely to undermine that part of its business to win the AI race against Microsoft and OpenAI.
“They have to bake advertising into it,” Clinch insisted. “Otherwise, they’re creating AI just to kill themselves.”
Google resisted the suggestion that ChatGPT-style AI interactions could impact its business, saying it has found that people use Search more and are more satisfied with their results when using Overview.
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