Google says users want summaries over links as it tries to balance 'a healthy ecosystem' amid AI Overview lawsuit

As AI takes over search, Google is saying that users want summaries over the traditional “10 blue links,” all while a new lawsuit targets AI Overviews for their harm to the rest of the web.

Over the past couple of years, Google Search has put increasingly heavy emphasis on summaries generated by AI, in turn taking some of the focus away from traditional links. While Google has said that traffic sent to the rest of the web is still “relatively steady” despite the emphasis on AI Overviews, major publishing group Penske Media has opened a lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit attributes major drops in Penske’s affiliate revenue to a loss of traffic originating from Google due to AI Overviews. It further takes issue with the lack of choice where Penske and other publishers can either continue to feed into AI Overviews or block themselves from Search altogether, which would be devastating for any website today.

Penske, the publisher behind The Hollywood Reporter and Rolling Stone, among others, isn’t the only one who’s taken issue with Google’s shift to AI. Earlier this year, the News/Media Alliance said that AI Mode “[deprives] publishers of… both traffic and revenue” and called the practice the “definition of theft.”

But Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, Markham Erickson, has an interesting take on the situation.

When asked about the Penske lawsuit at an AI summit earlier today, Erickson explained how user preferences are changing, and how Google wants to balance meeting what their users want while still supporting the “ecosystem” built from how the classic “10 blue links” have worked in the past. Erickson says that user preferences are shifting from “factual answers and… links” to “contextual answers and summaries,” but that Google still wants to provide a way for users to get back to the “valuable content” on the web.

Erickson’s comments follow (via The Verge):

So, I don’t want to speak about the specifics of the lawsuit, but I can speak to our philosophy here, which is, look, we want a healthy ecosystem. The 10 blue links serve the ecosystem very well, and it was a simple value proposition. We provided links that directed users free of charge to billions of publications around the world. We’re not going to abandon that model. We think that there’s use for that model. It’s still an important part of the ecosystem.

But user preferences, and what users want, is also changing. So, instead of factual answers and 10 blue links, they’re increasingly wanting contextual answers and summaries. We want to be able to provide that, too, while at the same time, driving people back to content, valuable content, on the Internet. Where that valuable content is for users, is shifting. And so it’s a dynamic space. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that we have an overall healthy ecosystem.

Notably, this comes shortly after Google admitted in a lawsuit that “the open web is in rapid decline.” Google also recently argued that

More on Google Search:

• Google says ‘the open web is in rapid decline’ weeks after arguing in favor of AI
• Google now lets you set ‘Preferred Sources’ for Top Stories carousel
• Google says AI not causing traffic declines & that it cares more about web’s health than competition

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