When Google recently announced radical changes to its search tool that will overshadow the page of blue links we’ve been used to seeing for more than a decade, online advertisers had something of a collective freak-out. The Alphabet-owned company called it the biggest such shift in more than 25 years and that the search bar would be “completely reimagined” with artificial intelligence.
Forget sponsored links. Now “conversational discovery ads” will be built to sit inside AI answers themselves and potentially include a chat agent so the user never clicks through to a website. On the day of the announcement, an online-advertising lobbyist I know texted their contact at Google to find out what it meant for their industry. The answer was noncommittal. Even some people at Google don’t seem to know where this will lead.
It also got immediate pushback from a British regulator, which ordered Google to let website owners block their content from being used in its AI search features. Some publishers will see that as a necessary defensive measure, but others may fear missing out on a new route to eyeballs. That’s because the technology is largely untested and its impact unclear.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.