😬 Plea for Sanity in AI Overviews Era

Folks, we are on the precipice of a search revolution. AI is poised to devour organic search completely. 

At their annual I/O conference this past week, Google announced that Search Generative Experience would be known as AI Overviews; it stands to revolutionize search both for the user and for publishers of content, such as newspapers, media outlets, and independent journalists. This is one venue in which I believe that Alphabet is going too far in the name of profit. We’re taught that profit is a good thing, so what’s my concern? 

By ‘too far,’ I mean they are degrading the quality of their own Search product in the interest of increasing user acquisition and adoption of their AI engine, Gemini.

The thing that made Search an enjoyable user experience was the ability to find answers to key questions from legitimate authorities in the respective fields. Now all of that subject matter expertise is getting concentrated and ingested into the large language models that power Gemini, and like it or not, AI Overviews is indeed the future of Google Search, as announced by Liz Reid at Google I/O this week.

You’ve probably seen the interface I'm talking about, or have been asked if you want to opt into it; right below the search bar before the paid ads. Soon all aspects of the main page of Search will have this look and feel.

I, for one, am not a fan of this user experience being the dominant force in Search. It renders the entire name of the tool, “Search” moot. Instead of a search, this feels like force-feeding information bordering on propaganda.

As Liz Reid, Google’s Head of Search, points out in her blog, AI Overviews specifically stands to cannibalize local search, and that’s what I want to focus on. Local makes up a lot of my focus as a demand gen & PR director, and the ability for small businesses to rank their content and drive traffic to their website in the most hyper-targeted of queries is an underappreciated aspect of Google Search. 

We seem a long way afield from the advice that Google’s lauded creator of SafeSearch and Head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts used to give us content marketers back in the aughts, “make good content that does no harm” and you should be able to be seen in Google because people will want to share that content and link back to you.

Now with all the information generated by Gemini, Google is poised to alter the Search experience as we know it. I’m concerned from both the user perspective and the marketer perspective, as SEO has been a bedrock of my customer acquisition system for the past decade. While I have transitioned into Demand Gen and PR, I always keep SEO as an integral lever in my marketer’s arsenal and I am deeply concerned about the future that artificial intelligence is consuming the real estate once reserved for human content creators, webmasters, and journalists.

Search as an AI-powered experience will strip publishers of their intellectual property, feed it into Google’s large language model and spit it back out in the way that Google wants it to appear. This may seem benign and helpful, but this consolidation of reviews, maps, and customer feedback into AI-fabricated synopses runs contrary to the way Google’s PageRank initially functioned, as a barometer for on-site best practices as well as an organic linking profile, showing that your content was worth quoting, mentioning or linking from other sources.

There will be some “resource links” that will be provided at the end of each AI-generated synopsis, but they are a far cry from the original PageRank engine that content marketers and publishers are used to.

Reid claims that “people like that they can get both a quick overview of a topic and links to learn more. We’ve found that with AI Overviews, people use Search more and are more satisfied with their results.” She doesn’t buttress this claim with any statistics, and David Pierce doesn’t list any challenges to her assertion in his article.

David Pierce, in what reads as somewhat of a press release in the Verge, opines “AI Overviews may not be fun or charming, but as a result, they might get things right more often.“ Excuse me if I’m more than a bit skeptical; he cites Perplexity and Arc for not citing and linking users to actual sources of information. That’s where this will get truly menacing and dystopian. If publishers are simply feeders for Google’s all-knowing information repository, what motivation do they have to be reliable, accurate, and as helpful as possible for the user? 

From a user’s perspective, searchers will be required to “opt-in” to the traditional “Web” search. This is the list of blue links that you’re used to, and I honestly miss. Opting in means “Web” will be a tab across the upper navigation of Search, alongside Images, Videos, Maps, and News tabs.

So, that being said, this is my plea for sanity. Can we please reward the websites and publishers who are producing original, authoritative content?

Is Gemini impressive? Yes, undoubtedly. Some parts of this are legitimately interesting time-savers that start to resemble a sort of “C3PO, human-cyborg relations” droid embedded right in your smartphone.

But other parts of it feel downright dystopian and predatory. Google already has a monopoly on Search, so this will represent a seismic shift in the media landscape. If people aren’t worried, they are not paying attention. 

By rolling up Search rankings into AI Overviews, Google is preying on the intellectual capital of the creators, reporters, and entertainers, whose original ideas, reviews, podcast episodes, and articles, are fed into a black box of fallible machine learning, and regurgitated as objective truth.

I want to stay optimistic here, so what is the solution? In my opinion, it is to always click that “Web” button, and show Google by your user actions that AI Overviews is not the type of Search experience we want to have. In fact many SEOs like Lily Ray of Amsive, are indicating that AI Overviews is not even ready for wide release and the community forum is already filled with users like me curious how to disable the feature. 

As your “takeaway,” or “next step,” I implore you to not just collect the output of Gemini’s LLM when you ask a query, but actually do a bit of your own searching, thereby rewarding the websites who have put time, intelligence and effort into authoritative, unique content.

Thanks for reading!

Mark

P.S. Links after the poll.

 David Pierce ref link

 Liz Reid ref link

Further reading: EMarketer - Sara Lebow