Google thinks it can have AI summaries and a healthy web, too

One of Google’s apical executives defended its usage of AI summaries successful hunt results during an AI summit successful New York connected Monday. 

When asked astir a caller suit by Rolling Stone’s genitor company, Penske Media Corporation, over Google’s AI Overviews, the company’s vice president of authorities affairs and nationalist argumentation Markham Erickson said idiosyncratic preferences are shifting distant from “factual answers” provided by archetypal websites to the contextual summaries provided by AI Overviews, which look astatine the apical of the main leafage of hunt results. The company’s goal, Erickson said, is to support a “healthy ecosystem” with some AI summaries and regular hunt results, sometimes referred to arsenic 10 bluish links.

Evidence has emerged precocious that suggests that hunt traffic plummets with AI summaries. In its lawsuit, Penske alleged that this driblet successful hunt postulation leads to a diminution successful gross for online publishers. 

Here is what Erickson said erstwhile asked astir the lawsuit: 

So, I don’t privation to talk astir the specifics of the lawsuit, but I tin talk to our doctrine here, which is, look, we privation a steadfast ecosystem. The 10 bluish links service the ecosystem precise well, and it was a elemental worth proposition. We provided links that directed users escaped of complaint to billions of publications astir the world. We’re not going to wantonness that model. We deliberation that there’s usage for that model. It’s inactive an important portion of the ecosystem. 

But idiosyncratic preferences, and what users want, is besides changing. So, alternatively of factual answers and 10 bluish links, they’re progressively wanting contextual answers and summaries. We privation to beryllium capable to supply that, too, portion astatine the aforesaid time, driving radical backmost to content, invaluable content, connected the Internet. Where that invaluable contented is for users, is shifting. And truthful it’s a dynamic space. Ultimately, our extremity is to guarantee that we person an wide steadfast ecosystem.