How AI is going to change the Google search experience

For many Americans, Google is the internet. It's the foundation for how they live online, "one of the main interfaces through which people interact with the internet, their computers, and their phones," John Herman said at New York magazine. Now that interface is changing dramatically: The company last week announced it will roll out artificial intelligence search summaries to all of its users by the end of the year — potentially altering how we use the internet, along with how advertisers and publishers reach us. "The question of whether Google is in the midst of resetting the entire economy of the web … won't be open for long," Herman said.

"Google is reinventing itself for the AI age," Daniel Howley said at Yahoo Finance. People who use Google to search now won't simply get a list of links — instead, they'll see an AI-generated overview "that offers summarized responses to queries along with links to the sources." And there's more to come, said CEO Sundar Pichai. Google is still in the "very early days of the AI platform shift." What will change?

'A handful of large companies'

"The shift stands to shake the very foundations of the web," said The Washington Post. The new search engine "directly answers queries with complex, multi-paragraph replies." That may be helpful, but it also pushes the links we look for further down the page "where they're less likely to be seen." That potentially threatens the web traffic of "millions of creators and publishers" who need the traffic that Google sends their way. Rather than a diverse, user-created internet, the result could be "a system where information is provided by just a handful of large companies."

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This raises a question, said The New York Times: "Can Google give AI answers without breaking the web?" If the AI summaries work as well as intended, users "won't need to click on any links at all." And that means that all those publishers, and the articles they create — and which provide the foundation of those AI summaries, after all — might go away. "The grand bargain on which Google's relationship with the open web rests — you give us articles, we give you traffic — could fall apart."

Same as the old boss?

Such concerns might be overblown. Most of the value of Google's new AI search tool "comes from the information online that Google can already pull up, and which a chatbot can simply translate into a digestible format," Matteo Wong said at The Atlantic. That makes the new Google a lot like the old Google before "product marketing and snippets and sidebars and Wikipedia extracts" took over the company's search results. That will "streamline but not upend the work of searching."

Others see a more dramatic shift. "It's as though Google took the index cards for the screenplay it's been writing for the past 25 years and tossed them into the air to see where the cards might fall," Lauren Goode said at Wired. The new search engine "does the work for you" of sifting through links for information. There's a risk, though: Sometimes the summaries are wrong. And when users look at summaries — instead of source information — "errors are more consequential."