AI Overviews, Google’s AI-generated summaries that sit above organic search results, are already eroding traffic for many publishers and creators. However, publishers are getting “higher-quality clicks,” according to Elizabeth Reid, Head of Google Search, in a new interview.
Why we care. Google Search is continuing to evolve in the direction of AI Overviews, where less clicks to websites is the new normal.
Clicks. Here are some quotes from Reid’s interview with the Financial Times about the AI Overviews and the impact on clicks and traffic (a.k.a., that necessary evil) to publishers:
“We see the clicks are of higher quality, because they’re not clicking on a webpage, realising it wasn’t what they want and immediately bailing. So, they spend more time on those sites. We see that it shows a greater diversity of websites that come up.
“What you see with something like AI Overviews, when you bring the friction down for users, is people search more and that opens up new opportunities for websites, for creators, for publishers to access. And they get higher-quality clicks.”
Reid also said that AI Overviews are “designed to get you started and then help you dive deeper,” because “relying on webpages… can be difficult and AI Overviews provide more “substance” than individual webpages:
“But if your question is long, finding a webpage that covers every part of your question is hard, and sometimes what you get is a very surface-level webpage. Technically it talks about every one of your words, but you didn’t get much substance. With generative AI, we can go and look for web pages that talk about specific subsets. So, we’ll take that query, and we’ll turn it into multiple queries.
“And then we’ll say, a-ha, OK, you’re comparing two items that are not traditionally compared. Let me find a webpage about one item. Let me find a webpage about another. And then, you can expose websites that go in more depth on part of a topic, instead of just a webpage that is surface level about the whole topic.”
Not the first time. Reid follows Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who previously said that AI Overviews are good for click-through rate (CTR):
“If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.”
But. I’ve seen no evidence to back up Reid or Pichai’s claim. CTRs to websites are hitting new lows. Also, traffic and revenue for several websites (see: Chegg as one example) started to decline around May, which is when Google launched AI Overviews. Microsoft Bing’s Fabrice Canel has also talked about “qualified clicks” being the measure of success in AI search.
Ads and AI Overviews. There are “a lot of opportunities for ads” above, below and within AI Overviews, according to Reid, adding that “Ads are relevant whenever users are going to make a choice that has some commercial aspect”:
“When a query is predominantly commercial intent — like we think you want to buy something — then we might often show ads. But sometimes we think you probably don’t want to [see] ads, and so we don’t want to give everyone ads. But some people might want to buy something. If [you search] ‘how to clean a stain out of the couch’ and the first thing we show is a bunch of ads, you’re like, ‘Whoa, I just wanted some advice.’
“But if we’re giving you ideas and then we say, ‘if you’re having trouble you might want to consider a stain-remover product’, and then we give you some ads for stain-remover products, it feels natural and in context.”
How search will change. Some of Reid’s notable quotes:
“…we want to make search effortless. That assumes multimodalities…”
“It will get more personalised over time, not just in the results, but in how you learn well. Are you somebody who learns well with videos or are you someone who prefers text?”
How search won’t change. Reid said “never say never” about there being a paid version of Google Search, but Google Search will remain free for the foreseeable future:
“Ensuring that search in general, the essence of it, is available for free, to allow access to information, will be important. There may be some aspects for people who have subscriptions in the future. But the core of search we want to have available for everyone for free, yes.
Google Search also won’t become a “chatbot” in the style of ChatGPT, according to Reid:
“We think of search as more of an information-focused question. We are starting to experiment more with the idea that people sometimes have a question that has multiple parts plus a follow-up. And if you have a follow-up question, you don’t want to start over from scratch.
“But it’s more designed as: how can you further your journey without repeating it the same way you might to a human — rather than designing it in the sense of: do you have a friend to chat with and ask them their views? It’s much more about organising information.”
Also:
“We put a lot of effort in our models on paying attention to factuality. That’s a way that we make a different choice on search, compared with a chatbot. You typically have to choose between how factual it is versus how creative or how conversational it is.
“If you’re building a product that’s designed to be conversational, you might weigh it one way. But in the case of [Google] Search, we have weighted factuality and put extensive work into that. We have continued to raise the bar on that for the past several months.
How people are searching differently. According to Reid:
Younger users are asking “more and longer questions” and “more nuanced questions.”
“We see a lot of growth in multi-modality: people asking these text-plus- image questions. So, it’s not just, ‘What is this image?’ or ‘Here’s my question’, but combining them.
The interview. Google’s Elizabeth Reid: ‘Human curiosity is boundless and people ask a lot of questions’ (subscription required)
