The new Google AI Overview layout is a small win for publishers
Google’s AI Overviews got off to a rocky start, but it hasn’t deterred the tech giant from charging ahead with foisting AI-generated summaries upon your search results, like it or not.
On Thursday Google announced new updates to AI Overviews, some of which might make publishers a little happier. As of today, Google is moving the relevant sites section of its AI Overviews to the righthand side of the page. This is a change from the previous interface which was below the AI-generated summary and features the websites more prominently. Now when you Google something like “how to get marks off walls,” relevant pages show up right next to the summary. Other sites populate the page below in the classic format.
On mobile, relevant sites are a little less prominent, but you can peruse them by tapping the site icons on the upper right.
Additionally, Google is exploring a feature in its testing ground Labs that directly links to relevant sites. “[The goal is to] make it easier for people to click out and visit the sites that interest them and and reduce the friction even further,” Hema Budaraju told Mashable. “This experiment has shown positive results that these links make it possible for people to connect, and naturally will drive more traffic to publisher sites.”
Aside giving erroneous responses, like the notorious glue-on-pizza debacle, the debut of Google’s AI Overviews felt like a big middle finger to publishers who rely on search traffic and already have a tenuous relationship with the dominant search engine. “This will be catastrophic to our traffic, as marketed by Google to further satisfy user queries, leaving even less incentive to click through so that we can monetize our content,” Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, told CNN when AI Overviews was first announced in May. Indeed, Marc McCollum, chief innovation officer at publisher monetization company Raptive told the Associated Press, that search traffic could decline by 25 percent, costing many publishers their main source of revenue.
But that was then. Whether or not Google acquiesced to publisher backlash or simply wanted a better user experience is unclear. However, Google’s announcement carefully positions itself and AI Overviews as a conduit for discovering more by clicking out to publisher sites. Google claims that AI Overviews have contributed to a “greater diversity of websites” and “higher quality” of clicks on those sites. We’d love to get our hands on that data, but alas, we’ll have to take Google’s word for it.
Perhaps bolstered by its unpublished findings, Google is expanding AI Overviews to six countries: the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, with local language support. Plus, users enrolled in Labs can test out new two new additional features. As of today, Labs users can save specific AI Overview responses so you can easily access it again. Users can also opt to “simplify” a response if the AI Overview is too technical or complicated for novices.
