On Thursday, Google unveiled exciting AI-powered updates for Search and AI Overview. The tech giant will now display ads in AI-generated summaries for specific queries and add links to relevant web pages. Additionally, AI-organized search results pages will be rolled out across the U.S. this week.
Google’s push to integrate AI into its search is a great effort to keep users from switching to competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Perplexity, which has gained over 85 million web visits since launching two years ago.
Since its spring launch, AI Overviews has faced criticism for questionable advice—such as suggesting glue for pizza—and for citing unreliable sources, including outdated studies.
Although Google has made changes to improve accuracy, especially for current events and health topics, it admits the system isn’t perfect.
Rhiannon Bell: VP of User Experience for Google Search
“We’ll invest in AI Overviews and make it even more helpful. We’re doing everything that we can to bring the right content to our users.”
Google also reports that AI Overviews have boosted engagement among users aged 18 to 24, and the company is now generating revenue from the new ads feature.
U.S. mobile users will soon see ads in AI Overviews for relevant queries, like removing grass stains from jeans. Labeled as “Sponsored,” these ads will appear alongside non-sponsored content, sourced from advertisers’ existing Google Shopping and Search campaigns.
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While Google reports that users have responded positively to the ads, finding them helpful for connecting with relevant businesses, they also clutter the summaries. One ad format—a carousel of sponsored product results—pushes non-sponsored content further down the page, making it less visible.
The new ad design includes relevant web links. For example, if you search, ‘Do air filters protect your lungs?’, the AI Overview will provide a link to a study on air filters from the American Lung Association.
The redesign is now available in regions where AI Overviews are available, including India, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the U.S., and the U.K.
This week, AI-organized Search results pages launch on mobile in the U.S. When users search for recipe ideas, such as “What are some good vegetarian appetizers?”, they’ll see an AI-aggregated page featuring content from forums, articles, and YouTube videos, but without the ads found in AI Overviews.
Bell, referring to Google’s Gemini family of AI models explained:
“A customized Gemini [model] generates a full-page experience with results that are relevant and organized. With these AI-organized results pages, we’re surfacing more diverse content formats from a more diverse content set.”
Google plans to expand AI-organized Search results pages to more categories in the coming months, but publishers may bear the brunt of this change. A study found that AI Overviews could negatively impact around 25% of publisher traffic by de-emphasizing web links.
Experts estimate that this could lead to over $2 billion in revenue losses for publishers due to fewer ad views.
While recent earnings reports from Ziff Davis and IAC showed negligible impacts on large publishers’ traffic, that could change as Google, which holds over 81% of the global search market, rolls out AI features to more users and queries. As of July, AI Overviews were only appearing in about 7% of searches as Google adjusted the feature. The company claims it is considering publishers’ concerns while refining its AI search experiences.
