Will Google's new 'AI Overviews' overshadow actual web content?

Google's new search tool incorporates a new "AI Overview" with answers that displace the content written by millions of creators, aka “humans.”

So, why click a link to a website for an answer, when you can read the regurgitated information scraped and reassembled by AI?

That could spell trouble for certain websites. It’s a development that is prompting anxiety for some, such as local news websites, that aim to provide the best, most trusted information possible.

Not everyone share’s that anxiety, however.

“There’s this sort of niche I have that there is not a lot of competition in my space to write about Ballard. There aren’t 10 news sites all battling for the top spot in Google for what happened in Ballard that day,” said Meghan Walker with the local news site MyBallard.com

“MyBallard has been around for 17 years," Walker said. "So there is this level of trust that it has. I can’t tell you how many readers write in and say, 'MyBallard is my homepage.'”

“There is a sense of domain authority," she explained. "Authority over Ballard is important, and building a following that really resonates with your audience, I feel, is more important than ever.”

Google dominates how information is relayed across the internet. It’s not uncommon for someone to respond with, “Just Google it,” when asked a question. For many years, "Let Me Google That For You" was a common meme response to questions posed on social media.

The search engine crawls the internet’s websites, blogs, videos, social media, and more to find the best and most relevant results for users. Those users can then follow the links to the information.

But under Google’s latest approach, that last step may become obsolete.

An artificial intelligence program will not only crawl the internet for results, it will compile that information and offer it up top, without the need to visit any sources.

For example, we searched for, "How many Muslim US Presidents have there been?"

This is the response we received:

For the record, President Obama is a Protestant Christian, and was sworn in using Abraham Lincoln's Bible.

“Google is the last big external source of traffic for a lot of sites, especially publishing sites,” said Tom Capper, a senior search scientist at Seattle-based Moz.

Moz specializes in SEO (search engine optimization). It’s an entire field dedicated to optimizing any page on the internet so that it appears among top search results, whether that is for local Mediterranean restaurants, clothing made from all natural fibers, or local news.

Despite concerns, Capper says he’s optimistic about the situation with Google’s AI.

“The way Google makes money is still overwhelmingly by sending traffic to websites and that shows no sign of changing in the near future, so they are not suddenly going to present search results that don’t encourage any kind of click," Capper explained. "I think this varies a lot by the kind of search query that you are making."

Capper gives the example of asking Google, “How old is Vin Diesel?” That is the sort of question Google has already been providing answers to at the top of its search feed for years. So an AI answer is not going to change that.

“What Google is doing here is keeping you in their ecosystem, keep you using Google for this kind of information query," he explained. "But if you search for a more monetized query, buy a laptop or something like that, they will show you ads and encourage you to click through in various ways. That’s the sort of trend I expect to continue.”

Capper also expects that people searching for specific news won't be paused by an AI Overview.

“If your website, and the way it gets money is by answering these sorts of very low barrier of entry question, that is a difficult space to be in, it has been for a long time, and it’s only going to get worse," Capper explained.

But, "something like the Financial Times, I don’t think they’re quaking in their boots over this," he said. "You’re not going to read a Google AI overview instead of a Financial Times article, even though that is still informational. The bar is just going up.”

For what it’s worth, as of this publishing date, Vin Diesel is 56 years old.

Listen to Soundside’s full segment on Google’s move to use AI to search results by clicking the audio above.