This month, Google dropped a few hints about how its most important and lucrative product, Search, will be changing in the coming months. Earlier this year, the company rolled out AI Overviews — generated summary blurbs that are frequently passable and not infrequently completely erroneous — to many of its customers. “This week, we’re rolling out search results pages organized with AI in the U.S.,” the company said in a blog post. The test would be limited to “recipes and meal inspiration” for now, but searchers will “now see a full-page experience, with relevant results organized just for [them].” This, Google suggested, would be an exciting improvement. “You can easily explore content and perspectives from across the web including articles, videos, forums and more — all in one place,” the company said. Not only that, but the company is testing a new design for AI Overviews that “adds prominent links to supporting webpages directly within the text.” Oh, and one more thing about the AI Overviews: Google has been “carefully testing ads” for “relevant queries.”

It doesn’t take much extrapolation to imagine AI Overviews, which are currently contained in a box above the standard and ever-more-cluttered search page, expanding from summaries to more comprehensive digests of information, with more citations, more things to tap and click, and space for sponsorship. Google’s most visible, high-stakes AI deployment is a set of tools that will automatically find and “organize” content from the web, present it in summary with prominent links, and have big chunky ads for products, not just links. Sound familiar? Google’s vision for the future of AI is… Google, again.

The prevailing narrative around Google’s current situation is that, despite its leadership in AI research, it was caught flat-footed by the arrival of apps like ChatGPT. It’s been hampered in its attempts to respond by institutional caution and clumsy moderation choices, but also by fear that revamping Search, a great product gradually undermined by an even greater business model, might threaten its underlying ad business. There simply isn’t as much room for ads, and not as much tapping or clicking, in a world where search engines start answering questions. There’s a lot of truth in this story, but it depends on........

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