Google is transforming almost all services with artificial intelligence, and search is no exception. In the search, the company's most visible experiment is an AI overview, generating an instant summary at the top of the search results. However, these summaries have put Google in new legal troubles. Penske Media Corporation, the parent company of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, has filed a lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that AI-powered features will remove traffic from the original publisher and cut it into affiliate revenue.
According to the complaint, the AI overview goes further below the results page, preventing users from visiting the source website. Instead, readers get answers in Google's own words and reduce the incentive to click. Penske claims that these AI summaries contributed directly to measurable declines in site visits and even advertising and affiliate revenue. The lawsuit also underscores the lack of choice for publishers, claiming that they are either effectively forced to supply content to Google's AI systems or will completely disappear from search visibility.
In response to concerns at the AI Summit in New York, Markham Erickson, Google's vice president of government affairs and public policy, provided the company's push defense against AI overview. Erickson in a statement from Verge that AI search is evolving and user preferences are changing too. Erickson said the search audience was no longer satisfied with the simple factual answers and list of links. Instead, they are drawn to contextual answers and summaries that provide quick understanding at a glance. Therefore, it is drawn by an AI summary.
“We want a healthy ecosystem. 10 blue links were very useful for the ecosystem, and it was a simple value proposition. We don't just abandon that model, but what users want, as well as the models, we're also changing what users want. “We want to be able to provide that too, but at the same time, we're bringing people back to content, valuable content, the internet.”
However, lawsuits and other reports highlight that new systems of AI-powered Google search are stopping publishers' traffic. In fact, earlier this year, the News/Media Alliance criticized Google's new AI capabilities, labeling it a move that robbed publishers of both traffic and revenue, labeling it as a “definition of theft.”
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I'll adjust it
