Google thinks it can have AI summaries and a healthy web, too

One of Google’s top executives defended its use of AI summaries in search results during an AI summit in New York on Monday. 

When asked about a new lawsuit by Rolling Stone’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation, over Google’s AI Overviews, the company’s vice president of government affairs and public policy Markham Erickson said user preferences are shifting away from “factual answers” provided by original websites to the contextual summaries provided by AI Overviews, which appear at the top of the main page of search results. The company’s goal, Erickson said, is to maintain a “healthy ecosystem” with both AI summaries and regular search results, sometimes referred to as 10 blue links.

Evidence has emerged recently that suggests that search traffic plummets with AI summaries. In its lawsuit, Penske alleged that this drop in search traffic leads to a decline in revenue for online publishers. 

Here is what Erickson said when asked about the lawsuit: 

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.