Google's search engine brings bad news for websites

We're all probably familiar with how the web works, right? Websites allow Google to show them in search results. This is how websites get visitors and Google can be Google - one of the richest corporations in the world. All this at the expense of organizing all this information, placing ads in the right places, and developing tools that enrich the user experience.

What if half of that bargain disappears? That's what we were thinking on Tuesday, May 14, when Google debuted “AI Overviews” at its developer conference. The name itself isn't particularly catchy, but it's actually a major upgrade, or rather, an update, to the search engine. If it works as intended, it could mean big changes for traffic on websites that currently rely on Google's algorithms.

“AI Overviews” builds on something Google has been doing for a long time, but in this case it takes it a notch higher. You’ve probably noticed that if you type the name of a celebrity into Google, for example, you’ll see a panel before the “organic” results that presents information that Google most often pulls from Wikipedia. This way, you get the basic information without having to actually open the website.

So we can expect a big change soon, called “AI Overviews.” At Google’s conference, Liz Reid, the director of Google Search, described how they will serve up information about books, movies, travel, and more in the future. In a short video, they showed an example of someone asking Google a question. Google offered the result in the form of a fairly long text and a solution. No additional clicks were required.

Of course, Google did not write this information itself, but someone else did. There are several authors behind this information, but it was combined into one clear answer. The artificially intelligent panel does contain links to content on the web, but the question is why would the user click extra when they have all the necessary information in one place. We certainly see the advantages for the user and Google, but the other side of the bargain, i.e. the benefits for the websites, disappears.

The new “AI Overviews” feature is already available in the US, and is expected to be available in other parts of the world by the end of the year. Those involved in online sales in one way or another may be most concerned, because this update is completely changing the global online economy. When Google added the short summaries of information that we see today, website traffic decreased. The analytics company SimilarWeb called this the “zero click” effect. Simply put, users do not need to visit the source of information, because it is immediately available.

Google doesn't entirely agree with this. Liz Reid is in blog wrote: “We are seeing a higher number of clicks on links in AI Overviews compared to the page displayed in the classic way we are now used to.” A Google spokesperson said that the company is aware that content that will be in “AI Overviews” must be incentivized by creators to create it. Google, as they themselves say, will be closely monitoring the impact of the new update on website traffic.