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Journalism of Courage
AI Overviews for Search was one the major highlights among the bevy of AI-powered features announced at the recent Google I/O. Google said that starting May 14, upon using Google search, users will see AI overviews at the top of Google searches. This development came as a big blow to companies, businesses, and entities that rely on Google’s traffic.
While the apprehensions of many are valid, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, however optimistic, seems to be allaying the common fears associated with AI Overviews in search. Pichai in his latest interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel gave his perspective on how AI Overviews in search will help drive growth for high-quality content over time.
Here’s a look at the highlights from Pichai’s interaction:
Ever since it was announced, there has been a barrage of reactions with some claiming it to be ‘catastrophic to traffic’ and a ‘death blow to publishers’. When Pichai asked if he was expecting this kind of reaction, the Google CEO said that he understood the sentiment as it was a big disruptive change. Pichai said that ‘empirically’ what they are seeing is that people engage more when given context and it helps drive growth for high-quality content over time. The Google chief illustrated by saying that throughout transitions from desktop to mobile, there have always been concerns, but human curiosity is boundless.
“More than any company, we understand the symbiotic value of this ecosystem. If there isn’t unique and useful content being made, what are you organizing? These are disruptive moments and people are projecting concerns, which I understand given they’ve put a lot into creating content. But I remain optimistic how it will play out as we are committed to doing the right thing at an aggregate level.”
Nilay mentioned his concept of ‘Google Zero’ where Google traffic for many sites would go to zero, especially independent sites. He asked Pichai if this was the right outcome for people who made niche content. In his response, the CEO said that it is not clear to him if that is a uniform trend. He explained that when individual sites say that they are doing worse, it could be for a specific moment in time. This according to him was like a restaurant claiming to have fewer customers which also did not mean that people stopped eating food. “Historically, we’ve provided more traffic to the ecosystem over the past decade. You may be making a point about small sites versus aggregators – ironically there are times we’ve made changes to send more traffic to the smallest sites, with the aggregators in the middle complaining.”
To this, Pichai said that he felt the opposite. According to him, through AI previews that give context, people engage more and branch off, driving growth over time. “I look at the concerns raised with mobile – there were covers saying the web is dead, but we remained one of the largest referrers because we deeply cared about it. Even in the last year through Search Generative Experience, we’ve prioritized approaches sending more traffic while meeting user expectations. What’s positively surprising is people engage more, leading to growth for high-quality content,” he said.
When Pichai mentioned that he feels more people will click through AI previews, Nilay said that there is no public data for this. The interviewer went on to ask if Google would release this data. Pichai responded by saying, “At an aggregate level, if people don’t see value coming back from Google over time, we’ll pay a price – we have the right incentive structure. There are individual variations that are hard to sort out. But we are committed to doing the right thing at an aggregate level.”
When asked about the web being flooded with AI-generated content that could manipulate search rankings, Pichai said that how they sift through high and low-quality content is Google’s mission statement that has defined Google Search for years. He said that the teams at Google have been gearing up ranking systems to better identify high-quality content. He said that whoever can do that better will eventually win.
He said that people would likely value human-created experiences. Pichai, essentially, suggests a cautious and optimistic approach to integrating AI in content creation, focussing on the significance of quality and user preferences.
During the conversation, the interviewer recalled how Pichai made some indirect mentions of OpenAI and how the recent GPT-4o demo looked similar to the multimodal search agent demos. Based on this, the interviewer asked if Pichai was under pressure from competition. Pichai said that it was no different than the voice assistant competition between Siri, Alexa, etc., a few years ago. “When you have an evolving underlying technology, you get this kind of parallel innovation which is exciting as it allows radically improving experiences. We’ve had this vision for a powerful assistant but were held back by limitations in the technology until now,” he said.
Google said that it is rolling out AI Overviews in Search to everyone in the US by this week and around the world to over a billion users by the end of the year. The search giant has been testing the feature for a year.
