Google, the company that dominates the global search market, is testing a major change to its search interface that could have serious implications on the open web. The so-called Search Generative Experience (SGE), which uses AI to “generate” answers for your queries, pushes organic search results down the order. Meanwhile, the AI-powered SGE grabs information provided by human experts across various sites (often a direct copy of the text), clubs it all together, and passes it off to you as its own.
The new search experience shows fewer organic results
The current Google Search experience gives you a list of related web articles for anything you search. It highlights snippets from some articles that it determines as the most-related answer to your query. If you scroll down, you’ll find many more results organically derived from the web depending on the keywords you used for your search. But with the SGE, Google’s AI covers most of your screen, at least the first page of your search results. As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, the SGE covered the first 1,360 vertical pixels of the display even for a simple search for “best bicycle”.
This section contained shopping links and advice about things you should consider when shopping for a bicycle. Google pushed all organic results below it. For its part, the company does show a few (three) related links next to its “AI-generated” response, at least sometimes. However, as the publication notes, they aren’t always accurate or highly related links. Certainly not as accurate as organic search results. They aren’t even the top organic results. Instead, these are links to the articles from which Google’s AI is copying information to generate its response.
For example, a search for “best CPU” gave Tom’s Hardware links to articles from Maketecheasier.com, Nanoreview.com, and MacPaw.com next to the SGE text. But none of those are the top results in the current search experience. Worst yet, two of those articles don’t even provide lists of the best CPUs. One is a comparison of two CPUs while the other provides a guide on “how to choose the best processor for your MacBook”. That probably won’t be the intent of most people searching for the “best CPU.”
Plagiarism without proper linking to web articles
There’s an even bigger problem with the SGE. The text that Google is passing off as an AI-generated response is usually copied from the linked articles. Sometimes it’s rephrased while some other times, it’s a word-to-word copy. The problem here is that most users won’t click those links because they have already got the information they were looking for. The information was originally provided by a human expert after careful research of a product. But the SGE blocks readers from going into the original source.
Google defended this behavior by saying that “generative responses are corroborated by sources from the web”. It added that “when a portion of a snapshot briefly includes content from a specific source, we will prominently highlight that source in the snapshot”. However, the SGE doesn’t tell users it’s a snippet from a web article, something the current search experience does. Instead, it makes the response look like generated by AI. There’s a button in the top right corner to see the source of the information provided in the SGE text, but it’s too much of a hassle.
All of this is a massive problem. For publishers, Google is driving less traffic to websites by relaying information from articles directly as part of the search result. For readers, it’s a bot telling you which is the best CPU with full authority, even though it can never evaluate a CPU on its own. It’s passing off the results of research from human experts as its own. This is blatant plagiarism and also a contradiction to Google’s E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust) standard used to “decide which websites and authors should rank highly in organic search.”
Google is still experimenting with the AI-powered search experience
Google says that it is currently experimenting with this new search experience where AI-generated responses surface ahead of organic results. Things may change by the time it’s ready for a public launch. But as it stands, the SGE doesn’t appear to prioritize driving traffic offsite to web articles, something the company claims is a priority. If this approach becomes the default search experience, it could severely affect the web information ecosystem. With no traffic coming their way, top publishers may leave the open web while, effectively degrading the quality of information on the web.