Google expands AI-generated summaries to its search engine results

Google is upgrading its search engine's artificial intelligence (AI) summaries amid intensifying competition from smaller competitors.

The company announced on Wednesday that it will feed its Gemini 2.0 AI model into its search engine in the US so it can field more complex questions involving subjects such as computer coding and math.

The AI-generated summaries will be placed above traditional web links, as part of a feature that was initially rolled out in May.

These links have become the lifeblood of online publishers dependent on traffic referrals from Google's dominant search engine.

Google is also expanding the "AI overviews" to teens who will no longer have to sign in to access them.

The feature had already been made available in more than 100 countries globally, but not in the EU.

New 'AI mode'

Google will also begin a gradual rollout of an "AI mode" option that will result in the search engine generating even more AI overviews.

When search is in AI mode, Google is warning the overviews are likely to become more conversational and sometimes head down online corridors that result in falsehoods that the tech industry euphemistically calls "hallucinations".

"As with any early-stage AI product, we won’t always get it right," Google product vice president Robby Stein wrote in a blog post that also acknowledged the possibility "that some responses may unintentionally appear to take on a persona or reflect a particular opinion".

More stringent guardrails are supposed to be in place to prevent AI mode from steering people in the wrong direction for queries involving health and finance.

The need for additional fine tuning is one reason Google is initially only offering AI mode in its experimental Labs section.

But these tests almost always result in the technology being released to all comers, a goal that Google is pursuing in response to AI-powered search engines from ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Impact on traffic

Google's amped-up usage of more sophisticated AI overviews is likely to amplify worries that the summaries will make web surfers even less likely to click on links to take them to sites with useful information.

Those traffic referrals are one of the main ways that online publishers attract the clicks needed to sell the digital ads that help finance their operations.

Google executives insist AI overviews are still driving traffic to other sites by driving up people's curiosity so they engage in more queries to learn more, resulting in more clicks to other publishers.

But those reassurances haven't placated publishers who believe that Google will be the main beneficiary of AI overviews, further enriching an internet empire that already generates more than $260 billion (€240.5 billion) in annual ad revenue.