Google is on a mission, adding AI to every corner of its services. And while these features cover every imaginable trick up AI’s sleeve, the company seems to have a favorite — AI overviews.
The tool scans through content that comes up under a search term, summarizing it into a nice, easy answer for a user. It first appeared in Google search in the U.S., then followed for hundreds more countries, and then appeared in places like YouTube more recently.
In the next step of Google’s AI overview rollout, the technology is now coming to Google’s Discover feed. First identified by 9to5Google, it appears that the Discover feed is beginning to test out this new technology.
In screenshots taken by 9to5Google, it shows an article from NASA about an upcoming mission to space. Above the article is a short summary of the news, with a message stating “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes”. It also shows a list of news providers that have covered this topic and have been included in the summary by Google.
This feature isn’t appearing on all news stories within the Google app, but it does appear to be rolling out at random for users in the U.S. Google has confirmed that this not a test but an official launch of the product.
It will first show in the U.S. on both iOS and Android, mainly focusing on trending lifestyle topics including sport and entertainment. However, as this is still the early stage, it is currently unclear how often these overviews will actually appear.
Concerns from publishers
Across all of these AI overview rollouts, there has been increasing concern from publishers about traffic being moved away from their pages. The same was said with YouTube creators when the AI overview rolled out there.
Google has tried to soften this slightly with the launch of Offerwall. This is a feature that lets publishers give their sites’ readers a selection of ways to read their content. This can include micropayments, taking surveys, watching ads, and more.
This, according to Google, will allow publishers to have more control over how they make money. However, as recently noted by The Economist, worldwide search traffic is already down by 15% year on year.
While this change to Google Discover will bring ease for a lot of users skimming through stories, it will also likely worsen the traffic issues being seen for publishers.
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