Google Search AI Mode

[br4in]

Google demo'd AI Mode in today's I/O 25 event, starting at around 1:53:00 in the keynote livestream. More info here. And relevant press coverage here.
This is basically Perplexity on steroids, especially with the Deep search mode on. It's only available in the US for now.
They also demo'd shopping-specific features with AI mode at around 2:07:10. More info here.
They also announced AI overviews are globally available now.

You can access AI Mode directly here.

I'm left wondering.. what future do informational websites have at this point, we might have to rethink the types of websites that we should make. I'd love to hear your takes on this!

 

[secretagentdad]

Pretty wild if the claims hold up.
Lets see how bad it trips over its own feet.
They have a real way of castrating their tools to defeat any kind of scalable intent.

 

[DunderMannen]

I have a hypothesis they will remove the SERP sooner or later.

Imagine they do it. All the other AI tools already rely on scraping Google for feeding it's algorithm. Once this is no longer possible, big G has a head start to actually accelerate past Chat, Perplexity etc. They also control the ENTIRE truth, and we all know that's G's big goal (oh and sell ads inside the "truth").

 

[Ryuzaki]

In the past I've mentioned how Google's entire existence depended on scraping everyone else's websites but you weren't supposed to scrap theirs. Someone recently had a similar thought, which was that Google says that if we use humans or AI to simply rewrite existing content without adding value then it's low-value, low-effort content and won't be allowed to rank. Yet that's exactly what they're doing with their own AI Overviews and they don't even have to rank them. They put them in the 1st slot by default. Rules for thee and not for me!

 

[bernard]

At some point you'd think that there needs to be some incentives for contributing to AI training sets.

It will probably begin in Europe with the EU forcing american companies to pay for using european newspapers etc as their training material.

I'd like to see some kind of automated scrape-to-crypto program though. Should be easy to like how Brave browser allows microdonations to websies. The bot scrapes and decides if the content is worth keeping, if it is, it deposits a small amount in your crypto address.

The AI companies still need some human research but more and more will be behind Substack paywalls and newspaper paywalls. The days of free content from advertising is coming to an end.