Google will begin showing ads in AI Summaries, the AI-generated summaries it provides for specific Google searches, and will even add links to relevant web pages for a few of these summaries. The company can also be launching AI-organized search results pages within the US this week.
The increasing importance of AI in Google's core search product is an try to discourage users from switching to alternatives resembling ChatGPT or OpenAI's Perplexity, which use AI to reply most of the questions traditionally asked of Google. confusion said in May that its global user base had grown to greater than 85 million web visits – a drop within the ocean compared According to Google, but impressive considering Perplexity only launched two years ago.
Since its launch this spring, AI Overviews has been the topic of much controversy, going viral for its dubious statements and questionable advice (resembling adding glue to pizza). A current one report from SE Ranking, an search engine optimization platform, found that AI Overviews cites web sites that “usually are not fully reliable or evidence-based,” including outdated studies and paid product listings.
The essential problem is that AI Overviews sometimes has difficulty identifying whether a source of data is fact or fiction, satire or legitimate information. In recent months, Google has made changes to how AI Overviews works, including limiting answers to current events and health topics. But the corporate doesn't claim it's perfect.
“We will spend money on AI overviews and make them much more helpful,” said Rhiannon Bell, vp of user experience at Google Search, in a press conference. “We are doing all the things we will to supply the appropriate content to our users.”
Separately, Google has said that AI Overviews has led to a rise in engagement on Google Search, particularly amongst people aged 18 to 24 – a key demographic for the corporate.
Now Google is taking steps to monetize the feature by adding ads.
Users within the US on mobile devices will soon see ads in AI digests for “relevant searches,” resembling methods to remove a grass stain from jeans. The ads marked with the “Sponsored” label appear alongside other non-sponsored content within the AI ​​summaries and are available from advertisers’ existing Google Shopping and Search campaigns.
AI Overviews ads have been available to a collection of users for a while, and Google's internal data shows they’ve been well received.
“People find AI Overviews ads helpful because they will quickly connect with relevant corporations, products, and services to take the subsequent step after they need it,” wrote Shashi Thakur, VP of Google Ads, in a blog post shared with TechCrunch.
But the ads also clutter AI Overviews' summaries. One format, a carousel of sponsored product results, is embedded directly into AI summaries and positioned to spotlight non-sponsored content.
The recent design for AI overviews that include the ads include highlighted links to webpages that could be relevant. For example, for those who search “Do air filters protect your lungs?”, AI Overviews might display a link to a study on air filters from the American Lung Association.
The redesign has been tested for several months and is now rolling out to regions where AI Overviews was already available, including India, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the US and the UK
Finally, a separate product, AI-organized search results pages, is launching on mobile devices within the US this week. Searches for recipes and food inspiration—for instance, “What good vegetarian appetizers or dinner ideas are impressive?”—can pull up an AI-aggregated page of content from across the online, including forums, articles, and YouTube videos.
However, AI Overviews ad formats usually are not taken into consideration.
“A customized Gemini model generates a full-page experience with relevant and arranged results,” Bell explained, referring to Google’s Gemini family of AI models. “With these AI-organized results pages, we’re surfacing more diverse content formats from a more diverse content set.”
Google plans to expand these pages to other search categories in the approaching months.
Publishers may very well be collateral damage.
A study found that AI overviews could negatively impact around 25% of publisher traffic because of the underemphasis on website links. On the revenue side, an authority cited by the New York Post appreciated that AI-generated overviews could end in greater than $2 billion in publisher losses because of the resulting decline in ad views.
AI-generated search results from Google and competitors don’t yet look like affecting traffic from major publishers. In their most up-to-date earnings results, Ziff Davis and Dotdash Meredith are the parent corporations of IAC marked the consequences are negligible.
But which will change because Google, what Commands over 81% of the worldwide search market, expands AI overviews and AI-organized pages for more users and queries. According to at least one treasureIn July, AI overviews only appeared for about 7% of searches as Google pulled the feature to make adjustments.
Google says it continues to contemplate publishers' concerns because it develops its AI search experiences.
