Google Search Overview AI - Impact and considerations

Google Search AI

The goal of this service is to provide users with AI-generated information gathered from trusted sources, websites, and services. Currently, news websites and product reviews are most affected, and we're starting to see other answers being generated as well.

Google seems to have stayed away from health topics or giving direct advice—anything that might make them liable. This may also be a result of how they're rolling out the feature; the responses seem cached and pre-generated based on the most frequent questions and trending products.

The impact

The impact is already pretty clear. Many users are now getting the answers they're looking for—product recommendations, news summaries, or insights—without needing to visit additional websites or services.

If this continues to roll out, users who trust Google (or aren't that tech-savvy) are initially going to be very trusting and engaging with this new service, making them less likely to click through to websites and services that traditionally provided curated content by professionals and experts.

Services and news organizations are starting to see less traffic and engagement, but Google will still be indexing the websites. They're gathering the latest news, reviews, and information to train their AI system on that content.

This means the more these services try to provide better quality content, the more likely it is for Google AI to catch up and provide summaries of past events.

Cutting-edge news and events will be unaffected, as will live updates and short-lived information. However, traffic on semi-recent news articles is already dropping because Google AI can generate a summary response of what has happened, curated from multiple sources into one overview at the top of the results.

Other industries such as product reviews are also getting equally impacted.

The cycle

As web services and content writers improve their format and add more information or detail, this could just be used as training data for Google AI to create detailed summaries. This may continue a cycle already ongoing between Google and publishers, but many areas will begin getting more negatively impacted by this new service.

Impact on users

I foresee more services putting detailed information behind paywalls or user accounts to prevent Google AI from indexing content they don't wish to appear in Google AI responses. This ultimately means more users will be negatively impacted, needing to create more accounts or pay for content they used to get for free.

Impact on advertisers

This may also impact advertisers, who may feel like websites will be getting fewer impressions, so they'll begin changing their models to adapt to the changing web landscape.

Looking forward

The service is still in the early stages, and there are clear limitations to LLMs and the resources required to run AI.

This is not a service Google can easily and affordably scale unless it clearly produces better results, services, and ultimately money.

Google search is also largely funded by Google ads, and people won't be paying for Google ads if they feel Google AI will ultimately take the content and drive less traffic to those services anyway.

It's good to already look internally at what steps you might want to take in the near future, depending on how rolled out and successful the AI overview becomes.

There's also the consideration of how users are already using AI to replace Google search, especially as most phones come with built-in AI features that users are relying on more and more to find information.

It's not all doom and gloom

In the past, Google has tried to push Google products and services that affected search, such as Google AMP, which created a big stir and then slowly died out and is hardly used these days. Being in the loop is important and there's always the potential for Google to have a large impact on businesses and services, but it's not always the case.

There are very clear limitations, costs, and issues with AI services. Google search AI is no exception and may even be further limited due to the scale and existing services offered by Google.

Cloudflare has also announced it plans to rollout features to automatically block AI scrapers from stealing and training on copyright content.

We'll need to see where Google and other search engines take the use of AI in their results.