Due to its organisation of all this data, placement of advertisements alongside it, and development of profitable technologies on top of it all, Google becomes one of the most valuable organisations on Earth and attracts traffic to its websites. However, what occurs if just one side of the agreement vanishes? When Google presented “AI Overviews” at its annual developers’ conference on May 14, I thought of that.Its moniker belies a hugely important improvement to its search engine that, if implemented as planned, could drastically lower the volume of visitors that websites receive.
While Google has been doing this for a while, AI Overviews expands on it considerably. Many people are aware of what occurs when they look for a celebrity’s name. The user is greeted with a fact panel that provides basic information without requiring them to visit the page containing the source material, pulling information from sources such as Wikipedia, prior to the “organic” list of search results.AI Overviews will soon take over for a significantly wider range of applications.
Head of Google Search Liz Reid gave a presentation on stage about how information on travel, movies, literature, and “and more” will be provided. In a test video, a user asks Google, “Why does my candle burn unevenly?” and is promptly given a lengthy explanation and answer that spans several paragraphs. No need to click any more. Naturally, someone else wrote the information; Google did not. More likely, a group of people did, and their combined knowledge has been synthesised into a single, concise response. Sure, the AI-powered panel has connections to relevant online content, but there’s usually not much of a reason to click on it.The user finds it efficient, and Google benefits from it as well, yet the handshake is broken.
Source: Bloomberg
Al Overviews, which will be available in much of the world by the end of the year after being introduced in the US this week, is a concerning development for the larger online economy. Consider Wikipedia to be a canary: Traffic fell off when Google began sourcing its content straight from search results due to what analytics company SimilarWeb dubbed the “zero click” effect, which allowed consumers to find what they were looking for without having to click through to the source.
Each “zero click” results in a loss for online publishers.Google will deprioritize publications in a similar manner as it aims to compete directly with know-it-all Al tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai. publications are already experiencing a significant decline in traffic from social media businesses that are less interested in covering current affairs. The prognosis is dire: Gartner estimates a somewhat modest 25% decline in search engine traffic by 2026.
The Washington Post was informed by an SEO specialist that publications anticipate being “bludgeoned.”Google, for one, doesn’t agree with this evaluation. The impact on other links that would normally appear on a search results page but will now be pushed way below the AI content is unknown, but Reid noted in a blog post that: “We see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional Web listing for that query.” A Google representative emphasized that the company understands that content creators need to be incentivized to produce content in the first place in order for Google to build it into Al.
Source: Firstpost
Accordingly, Google said it will be closely observing the impact AI Overviews have on traffic (though it is unclear how much the public will know about these metrics). In essence, what Google is offering is a more streamlined and easy-to-use method of accessing the internet, eliminating many of the inconveniences associated with the current Web and providing people with the information they need.
Though it may be welcomed by all, it must be admitted that Google is largely to blame for the mess that is the Web.Websites have been frantically trying to appease Google’s ranking algorithms for years by stuffing articles with keywords and using small, often dishonest, methods to prevent material from having the best chance of ranking well. After all, surviving on Google implies winning. Though AI Overviews is Google’s attempt to clean up its own mess, content creators in the era of AI will suffer as a result.
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