Do you remember when Google removed “Don’t be evil” from its code of conduct back in 2018? Well, it seems like they have been living up to that removal lately. At their annual I/O event in San Francisco this week, Google unveiled its vision for AI-integrated search, which involves cutting digital publishers off at the knees.
The new AI-powered search interface, called “Search Generative Experience” or SGE, includes a feature called “AI Snapshot” that provides an enormous summarization of the search query at the top of the page. This format of search is different from the traditional search-facilitated internet we are familiar with, where a featured excerpt and blue links are displayed.
While this change might seem relatively harmless at first glance, it raises an important question for the future of the already-ravaged journalism industry. If Google’s AI is going to mulch up original work and provide a distilled version of it to users at scale, without ever connecting them to the original work, how will publishers continue to monetize their work?
This new search interface will seemingly be swallowing even more human-made content and spitting it back out to information-seekers, all the while taking valuable clicks away from the publishers that are actually doing the work of reporting, curating, and holding powerful interests like Google to account.
Research has shown that information consumers hardly ever make it to even the second page of search results, let alone the bottom of the page. With Google hosting roughly 91 percent of all search traffic, the demo raises concerns for the future of the journalism industry.
The effects on the public’s actual access to information could be catastrophic if Google doesn’t figure out a way to compensate publishers for the labor it’ll be gleaning from the journalists. Currently, it is unclear whether or how Google plans to compensate those publishers. Publishers are wary of these changes and fear that this is the end of the business model for vast swathes of digital media. It’s up to Google to answer a lot of questions here and prioritize approaches that will allow them to send valuable traffic to a wide range of creators and support a healthy, open web.
