According to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, we are in a disruptive moment. While he’s optimistic that Google AI Overviews and Search will drive more traffic and engagement, that’s no consolation to the many content creators whose sites have been wiped out by Google in recent months.
In a new interview, Pichai discussed concerns that Google could harm websites and businesses, as well as the future of search, content and the web.
“These are disruptive moments.” Pichai was asked about publishers’ concerns following the announcement of the launch of AI Overviews at Google I/O. He compared this AI shift to concerns about the transition from desktop to mobile and the introduction of featured snippets:
- “I remain optimistic. … As a company, we understand the value of this ecosystem, and it is a symbiotic connection. If there isn’t a rich ecosystem creating unique and useful content, what do you compile and organize? That’s how we feel it.”
- “But I understand the feeling. It’s a big change. These are disruptive moments. AI is a major platform shift. People project outward and people invest a lot in creating content. It’s their business. So I understand the perspective [and] I am not suprised. We are working with many players both directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about the actual outcome.”
Doomed companies. Pichai was specifically asked about two websites that have complained loudly about losing 90+% of their Google traffic, including HouseFresh and Retro Dodo.
- “It’s always difficult to talk about individual cases and at the end of the day we try to meet user expectations. Users vote with their feet and people try to figure out what is valuable to them. We’re doing this on a large scale and I can’t respond on the specific website…”
- “It’s not clear to me if this is a consistent trend. I need to look at the data in aggregate [basis]Anecdotally, it’s common for people to come to an area and say, “I’ve been doing worse as a particular place.” But it’s like a single restaurant saying, “I started getting fewer customers this year.” .” People stopped eating food or whatever it is. That’s not necessarily true. Another restaurant may have opened next door that is doing very well. So it’s hard to say.”
- “Maybe you’re making a secondary point about smaller sites versus more aggregating sites… Ironically, there are times when we’ve made changes to actually drive more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of the sites that often complain are the aggregators in the middle. So should the traffic go to the restaurant that’s built a site with their menus and other things, or to people who write about those restaurants? Those are deep questions. I’m not saying there’s a right answer.”
Empathy. In an interesting moment, the tables were turned and Pichai was asked how it felt when OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. The point is: Google is doing the same thing to millions of websites – misusing their content for profit without permission. Pichai’s answers:
- “Look, whether you’re a website owner, a content creator or an artist, I can understand how emotional this transformation is. …”
- “In many of these cases, we have taken this approach to focus as much as possible on the creator community. We’ve been doing this for a long time with YouTube. We’re trying to figure out the best way to address this.”
- “…yes, I understand people’s emotions about it. I definitely have a lot of compassion for how people perceive this moment.”
- “Through this AI moment, over time there will be players who will do better by the content creators their platforms support, and those who do better will emerge winners. I believe that over time that will be a tenet of these things.”
AI content and ranking. Google is in a unique position as it helps generate AI content (via Gemini) that can be used to flood the web with the goal of ranking in search. Pichai said he thinks “using AI to mass produce content without added value is not what users are looking for,” adding:
- “Every time you have these disruptive platform changes, you go through a phase like this. I saw that this team invested so much. Our entire search quality team has spent the last year improving our ranking systems, etc. to better understand what quality content is. If I take the next decade, [the] People who can do this better, who can see through this, I think will win.”
AI overviews. Pichai continues to promote the idea that AI overviews increase search usage. Pichai called it “one of the most positive changes I’ve seen in search based on metrics.”
- “…In many cases, the reason people respond positively to AI overviews is because the summary we provide provides clear value and helps them consider things they might not have otherwise thought about. If you add value at that level, I think people will notice over time, and I think that’s the bar you want to reach. Our data over 25 years would show that if you’re not doing something that users find valuable or enjoyable, they’ll tell us immediately. We see that again and again.”
While that may be true, it seems like it shouldn’t be true, as I discussed in the Google AI overviews: More searches, less satisfaction. Pichai also completely avoided two questions about whether Google will release this data so people can verify whether Google’s claims about the AI Overview’s click-through rates and traffic are true.
A richer web. Pichai was asked what the internet will look like in five years:
- “I hope the web will be much richer in terms of modalities. Today I feel that the way people consume information is still not fully embedded on the Internet. Nowadays things exist in very different ways – there are websites, there is YouTube, etc. But I hope that over time the web will become much more multimodal, much richer and more interactive. It’s much more state-driven, which it isn’t today.”
- “The way I look at it is, while I certainly acknowledge that people could use AI to create a lot of spam, I also feel like with every new wave of technology, people don’t really know how to use it. When mobile came along, everyone took websites and pushed them into mobile applications. Then, later, people evolved [into making] truly native mobile applications.”
- “The way people use AI to actually solve new things, new use cases, etc. is still to come. If that happens, I think the web will be much, much richer too. So: Dynamically create a UI in a way that makes sense to you. Different people have different needs, but these days you don’t create this UI dynamically. AI can help you do this over time. You can do it badly and wrongly, and people can use it superficially, but there will be entrepreneurs who find an exceptionally good way to do it and great new things will come from that.”
The interview. You can watch the interview or read the full transcript in a tech news bulletin.