Google deploys AI Overviews, will it kill hundreds of millions of websites?

Google recently announced that they are implementing 'AI Overviews' into Google Search for users in the US and worldwide in the near future, opening up a completely new search experience.

Specifically, when users search on Google Search, AI Overviews will help users summarize answers along with their search results. According to 9to5Google, users can adjust the summary through three buttons: Original, Simpler and Break It Down.

1. Simpler: Summarize the answer concisely using simpler and easier to understand language.
2. Break It Down: The summary will help users dig deeper into the information the user is looking for.

According to the American technology giant, bringing AI into Google Search will help users search easier and save more time. The company will deploy AI Overviews to all users in the US first and will soon launch in many other countries.

In addition, in the near future Google Search will also have the ability to reason multi-step like the Gemini model to understand and answer the user's complex question right from the beginning without breaking it down into many simpler questions and Search sequentially as before.

In addition, AI in Google Search will also combine data from many different sources on the web to help users plan meals, appointments, workouts or trips.

Google can use AI to recognize content and allow users to search on Google Search using video, instead of having to enter text or voice as before. This will help users search more accurately than searching by text. Currently, this feature is only available to English-language Search Labs users in the US. Google said it will expand this feature to more regions in the near future.

Lesley Montoya

Update 16 May 2024