Google has not announced a date for when it will fully roll out the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE). We know that Google has started testing SGE in the wild with a small subset of US searchers, in fact it seemed to have disappeared. live today.
But Google has yet to announce when SGE and AI overviews will roll out to all search engines in the US and other regions.
Google I/O on May 14. There are some rumors floating around that Google might launch SGE, at least in the US and some other regions, on May 14, during the Google I/O keynote while Google CEO Sundar Pichai is on stage.
I mean, it makes sense to launch SGE at I/O – it’s Google’s biggest and most notable event of the year.
But again, Google hasn’t told me on or off the record that SGE will go live, much less that it will be released on a specific date. In fact, we had to squash some rumors about it earlier. Google once had a deadline of December 2023but google removed that term and did not release SGE.
How SGE could be launched. If Google releases SGE in the near future, I believe it will be released in a way that doesn’t disrupt its search ads. I think Google would launch general AI displays in search results that generally don’t contain any ads.
In fact, Google has said that the majority of queries people make every day don’t show search ads. And AI responses are generally better for longer-tail queries that might not have ads anyway.
Google has to worry about how the SGE interface will affect clicks on search ads, its number one source of revenue. So if Google launched SGEs but didn’t show them in search results with ads, that would solve this revenue problem.
It is likely that Google will also try not to show AI overviews for queries of a political or generally sensitive nature.
Right now, there are many examples of where the AI responses to SGE look really bad. It reminds me that when Google released highlights, there were plenty of embarrassing examples to point to.
So if Google can find a way to limit general AI views and not show them for those categories, Google can technically launch it.
Users will be able to opt out. Right now, SGE is a Labs experiment that you can toggle on and off to disable. But now that SGE is being tested in the wild, those in that test group have no way to opt out.
I’ve seen complaints today as Google just started rolling out live SGE testing where users want to opt out but can’t.
Why we care Many in our industry are concerned about the launch of SGE. Those who buy ads in Google search results worry about how it can affect clicks and conversions. Content publishers are also concerned about how Google organic search traffic might change with the launch. And content producers are concerned that Google will take their content, serve the answer to the searcher, and not profit from a single impression on their site.
Google has said that they continue to prioritize approaches that send valuable traffic to publishers. Google has also said it is showing more links to sites with SGE in search than before, creating new opportunities for content discovery. But do searchers click on those links? We do not know.
Stay tuned. As soon as we know, we’ll let you know more about when, where and how SGE will launch.
