[chatmasta]

Yeah, this seems like a great way to ensure Google AI summarizes the second best result behind your own. And in many cases, like when the result is about your product or company or someone associated with it, that could be very bad for you. Imagine if “PayPal sucks” is rank 2 for “how to withdraw from PayPal,” but the official website blocked the AI summary so instead it comes from the “PayPal sucks” domain…

Honestly, publishers should just allow it. If the concern is lost traffic, it could be worse — the “source” link in the summary is still above all the other results on the page. If the concern is misinformation, that’s another issue but could hopefully be solved by rewriting content, submitting accuracy reports, etc.

I do think Google needs to allow publishers to opt out of AI summary without also opting out of all “snippets” (although those have the same problem of cannibalizing clicks, so presumably if you’re worried about it for the AI summary then you should be worried about it for any other snippet too).

[omnimus]

I don't think you realize this is temporary state for Google. Their overall plan called Google zero is to provide answers fully like LLMs and never link to any other website (zero links). This has been their long term goal since the moment it was clear that the industry will manage to avoid copyright legal issues by training LLMs.

[dangus]

This “Google Zero” thing (which is just the name of a theory made up by some guy) is missing the part where Google figures out a way replace its ad revenue.

If Google doesn’t take you to someone else’s website or app, they can’t charge advertisers any money.

[omnimus]

Not sure why it would be controversial. They are already doing it.

[dangus]

But it’s not profitable, that’s my point.

They are doing it but it is less lucrative than the non-AI search engine.

Like video streaming, they are forced into this via new competition.

E.g., ChatGPT is the marketshare leader in the new version of search engines, local AI models + ChatGPT for complex queries is the default “search engine” of Apple Intelligence, not Google on Safari.

Google’s risk here is that they’re about to lose everyone who isn’t running queries from their own platforms who still overwhelmingly use Google for their “general life queries” today (Apple users on web browsers, Windows users on web browsers).

[omnimus]

I can't know whats Google plan nor do I care much. I am just saying that it is quite apparent that Google is trying to replace Search with LLMs because they are already trying to do it.

One would think that they have a plan why they are doing it. They are the ones seeing the numbers.

We can speculate here about their risks or the stupidity of the plan... but i wouldn't say Google zero is some conspiration theory - flawed strategy maybe. I don't think people would be surprised if google.com became big "ask gemini" field. Many users probably wouldn't even notice.

[trogdor]

Couldn’t they just show ads alongside the search result?

[dangus]

For sure, but is that proven to be as good at revenue as the status quo?

It’s kind of like how the movie industry killed their Blu-ray, DVD, and theater ticket sales in favor of streaming.

Or how digital download/streaming music took decades to match the pre-Napster revenue peak of the industry. It’s still barely ahead of that level and that’s before adjusting for inflation.

[omnimus]

I am sure they can figure out even better. Like put the product purchase link in the answer.

[SebFender]

Google had LLM's long before OpenAI did ...

[omnimus]

I know and they couldn't do anything with it until the startups opened the way to freely use licensed data.

[SebFender]

They actually knew exactly what to do but hey debated the outcomes - The rest were just desperate for attention and did whatever they could - very simple thought.