| For the past year-and-a-half since ChatGPT was released, a scary question has hovered over the heads of major online publishers: what if Google decides to overhaul its core search engine to feature generative artificial intelligence more prominently – and breaks our business in the process?Google Search head Liz Reid announced that new AI features are coming to Google’s lucrative search engine, including AI Overviews.
The addition of these answers is the most significant change that Google has made to its core search results page in years, and one that stems from the company’s fixation on shoving generative AI into as many of its products as possible. It may also be a popular feature with users – I’ve been testing AI overviews for months through Google’s Search Labs program, and have generally found it to be useful and accurate.
Liz Reid, vice president of search at Google, said in a blog post on Tuesday that the company would “continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators”.But parse these responses carefully, and you’ll see that Google is not saying that publishers’ overall search traffic won’t decline. That’s because Google can’t really predict what will happen once it starts showing AI-generated overviews in billions of search results a day, and how users’ behaviour may change as a result.