Google to favour AI answers over websites in huge change to search function

Google will favour answers created by artificial intelligence over traditional website links in a major shake-up of the search engine.

The tech giant said the move — one of the most significant since the company was founded in the 1990s — will speed up the process of finding information online.

The new feature will see AI-generated, summarised answers displayed at the top of the search engine’s results page, rather than first directing users to the traditional links to websites.

But it fuels fears for the future of traditional media outlets, which will be deprived of advertising revenue as users will be able to get information without ever having to visit their websites.

And the move also comes amid mounting concerns over the rise of AI and its impact on privacy, copyright and jobs.

The new feature — trialled last year — will be rolled out to hundreds of millions of users in the US this week before being introduced in other parts of the world.

The company hopes that more than a billion users will be using the technology by end of the year.

Announcing the update at Google’s annual developers’ conference in California, chief executive Sundar Pichai said: “This bold and responsible approach is fundamental to delivering on our mission and making AI more helpful for everyone.”

We will continue to innovate on the AI overview and also on how we send the most useful traffic to the web.

AI responses will only show up when they are the quickest and most effective solution — such as giving explanations on complex subjects — the company said.

Users will still see traditional website links for simple searches such as weather forecasts.

But experts have warned that around 25 per cent of internet traffic could be affected by the changes.

It means online publishers could lose money if the AI overviews — which cull information from other websites — result in fewer clicks.

Research by Raptive — which helps around 5000 website publishers make money from their content — found it could amount to billions of dollars of lost advertising revenue.

However, the tech giant claimed its research showed that the AI overviews led to users searching more and then looking at other websites.

Liz Reid, who oversees the company’s search operations, said the increase was because people “can suddenly ask questions that were too hard before”.

“In reality, people do want to click to the web, even when they have an AI overview,” she said.

“They start with the AI overview and then they want to dig in deeper. We will continue to innovate on the AI overview and also on how we send the most useful traffic to the web.”

Over the last 18 months, the increasing use of AI technology in chatbots such as OpenAI’s Chat-GPT and Google’s Gemini have already raised legal questions.

Critics say the tech giants behind the AI services are illegally pulling from copyrighted material — in other websites that the services cull information from — to advance their own products.

It’s an allegation at the heart of a high-profile lawsuit that The New York Times filed late last year against OpenAI and its biggest backer, Microsoft.

Raptive chief innovation officer, Marc McCollum, said: “The relationship between Google and publishers has been pretty symbiotic. But enter AI and what has essentially happened is the Big Tech companies have taken this creative content and used it to train their AI models.

“We are now seeing that being used for their own commercial purposes in what is effectively a transfer of wealth from small, independent businesses to Big Tech.”