We are in a disruptive moment, according to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google. While he’s optimistic that Google AI Overviews and Search will drive more traffic and engagement, that’s zero comfort to the many content creators who have seen their websites obliterated by Google in recent months.
In a new interview, Pichai discussed concerns about Google hurting websites and businesses, as well as the future of search, content, and the web.
“These are disruptive times.” Pichai was asked about publisher concerns after announcing the launch of AI Overviews at Google I/O. He compared this AI change to concerns about the transition from desktop to mobile and the introduction of highlights:
“I remain optimistic. … As a company, we realize the value of this ecosystem, and it’s symbiotic. If you don’t have a rich ecosystem making unique and useful content, what are you curating and curating? So we’re sorry.” “But I understand the sentiment. It’s a big change. These are disruptive times. AI is a big platform change. People are projecting and people are putting a lot into creating content. It’s their businesses. So I understand the perspective [and] That does not surprise me. We’re engaging with a lot of players, both directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about how it will actually play out.”
Condemned businesses. Pichai was specifically asked about two sites that have complained loudly about losing more than 90% of their traffic to Google, including HouseFresh and Retro Dodo.
“It’s always difficult to talk about individual cases and, in the end, we are trying to meet the expectations of users. Users are voting with their feet and people are trying to figure out what is valuable to them. We’re doing it at scale, and I can’t answer at the specific location…” “It’s not clear to me if this is a uniform trend. I need to look at the data in an aggregate [basis], so anecdotally, there are always times when people have come to an area and said, “I, as a particular place, have done worse.” But it’s like an individual restaurant saying, “I’ve started getting fewer customers this year.” People have stopped eating food’ or whatever. It is not necessarily true. He could have opened some other restaurant next door which is doing very well. So it’s hard to say.” “Maybe you’re making a secondary point about small sites versus more aggregated sites… Ironically, there are times when we’ve made changes to send more traffic to smaller sites. Some of these sites that complain a lot are the aggregators in the middle. So should the traffic go to the restaurant that has created a website with their menus and stuff or people writing about those restaurants? These are deep questions. I’m not saying there’s a right answer.”
empathy In an interesting moment, the tables were turned at Google and Pichai was asked about how he felt when OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. The point is that Google is doing the same thing to millions of websites: taking their content, without permission, for profit. Pichai’s Answers:
“Look, whether it’s website owners or content creators or artists, I can understand how emotional a transformation is. …” “The way we’ve taken this approach in a lot of these cases is to put the creator community as much as be possible at the center. We’ve been doing this for a while with YouTube. We’re trying to figure out the right ways to go about it through all of this.” “…yes, I understand people’s emotions about it. I’m definitely very empathetic to how people perceive this moment.” “Through this AI moment, over time, there will be players who will do better with the content creators who support their platforms, and who do better you will emerge as the winner. I think this will be a beginning of these things over time.”
AI content and classification. Google is in a unique position, where it helps generate AI content (through 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 adding any value is not what users are looking for,” adding:
“Any time you have these disruptive platform changes, you’re going to go through a phase like that. I’ve seen that team invest so much. Our entire search quality team has been over the last year adapting our ranking systems, etc. to better know what high quality content is If I take the next decade. [the] The people who can do it better, who can examine it, I think, will win.”
AI overview. Pichai continues to push the idea that AI overviews increase search usage. Pichai called it “one of the most positive changes I’ve seen in metrics-driven search.”
“…In many cases, part of what makes people respond positively to AI overviews is that the summary we provide clearly adds value and helps them look at things they might not have otherwise considered. If you’re adding value at that level, I think people notice that over time, and I think that’s the bar that you’re trying to get across. Our data will show, over 25 years, that if you don’t do any something that users find valuable or enjoyable, they let us know right away. We see that time and time again.”
While this may be true, it seems like it shouldn’t be, as I discussed in Google AI Overviews: More Searches, Less Satisfaction. Pichai also completely avoided two questions about whether Google will make any of this data public, so people can verify whether Google’s claims about AI Overview click-through rates and traffic are true.
A richer web. Pichai was asked what the web will look like in five years:
“I hope that the web will be much richer in terms of modality. Today, I believe that the way humans consume information is still not fully encapsulated in the web. Today, things exist in very different ways: you have web pages, you have YouTube, etc. But over time, I expect the web to be much more multimodal, much richer, much more interactive. It has a lot more status, which it doesn’t have today.” “I see it as, while I fully recognize the point that people can use AI to generate a lot of spam, I also think that every time there’s a new wave of technology, people don’t know how to use it. When mobile came along, everyone took web pages and fed them into mobile apps. Then, later, people evolved [into making] truly native mobile apps.” “The way people use AI to solve new things, new use cases, etc. is yet to arrive. When that happens, I think the web will also be much, much richer. So: dynamically compose a user interface in a way that makes sense to you. Different people have different needs, but you’re not dynamically composing that UI today. AI can help you do that over time. You can also do it wrong and in the wrong way and people can use it superficially, but there will be entrepreneurs who will find an extraordinarily good way to do it and from that will come great new things to come.”
The interview You can watch the interview or read the full transcript in some tech news rag.
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