Products You May Like
If you haven’t already, you’ll soon see AI-generated summaries and roundups at the top of your Google search results. Google’s “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE, was previously reserved for users who opted in. Still, now the tech giant plans to force it upon anyone who initiates a search from within the United States.
Introduced exactly one year ago, SGE uses AI to summarize definitions, product reviews, articles, and other content you’d typically have to do the hard work of clicking on yourself. The point, Google said, was to make the search experience easier so that “instead of asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself,” Google could do it for you. While that alone sounds eerily dystopian, you didn’t have to interact with SGE unless you opted into the feature voluntarily.
But from here forward, you won’t have a choice. A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land on Friday that users will soon see SGE overviews at the top of their results, whether they’ve toggled on SGE or not. The shift is said to be aimed at obtaining feedback from users who haven’t opted into the feature and might not know that it exists.
Examples of SGE at the top of Google search results.
Credit: Google
Though SGE will reportedly appear on a “subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the US,” users won’t know which queries will earn them an SGE response until after they’ve hit enter. Only Google knows, and its barometer is fairly subjective. “Google said it has a high confidence in the quality and value these queries bring to users,” Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz writes. “In general, Google told us it would show AI overviews when it’s truly additive and in the instances when people would get a better response than what they’d see on Search today.”
Schwartz warns that a shift like this could affect the level of traffic driven to sites that otherwise might have been clicked on organically. In one of Google’s own examples, for instance, searching for information about black-thighed falconets might yield sufficient SGE results to render any website links useless. When Google launched SGE last year, multiple publishers predicted that the feature could hurt websites that rely on traffic to survive—websites like the one you’re on right now.
SGE might complicate matters on the front end, too. More Google users are beginning to bemoan the search engine’s seemingly never-ending ad placements, which in many cases make it frustrating to use. Some users are even beginning to conduct their searches on Reddit and TikTok, leading Google to add a Perspectives section last year that highlights posts from everyday internet users.
If you think SGE might be a breath of fresh air after years of cutting through exhausting paid search results, Google told Search Engine Land that it will “continue to show ads in and around [SGE] overview experiences.” Even Google’s AI has something to sell.