WHO
Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity
WHEN
Now
Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, powered by its Gemini language model, will alter how billions of people search the internet. And generative search may be the first step toward an AI agent that handles any question you have or task you need done.
Rather than returning a list of links, AI Overviews offer concise answers to your queries. This makes it easier to get quick insights without scrolling and clicking through to multiple sources. After a rocky start with high-profile nonsense results following its US release in May 2024, Google limited its use of answers that draw on user-generated content or satire and humor sites.
The rise of generative search isn’t limited to Google. Microsoft and OpenAI both rolled out versions in 2024 as well. Meanwhile, in more places, on our computers and other gadgets, AI-assisted searches are now analyzing images, audio, and video to return custom answers to our queries.
But Google’s global search dominance makes it the most important player, and the company has already rolled out AI Overviews to more than a billion people worldwide. The result is searches that feel more like conversations. Google and OpenAI both report that people interact differently with generative search—they ask longer questions and pose more follow-ups.
This new application of AI has serious implications for online advertising and (gulp) media. Because these search products often summarize information from online news stories and articles in their responses, concerns abound that generative search results will leave little reason for people to click through to the original sources, depriving those websites of potential ad revenue. A number of publishers and artists have sued over the use of their content to train AI models; now, generative search will be another battleground between media and Big Tech.