Google's AI update poised to disrupt industries that depend on search traffic

Google's "AI overviews" may very well change how the internet operates, spelling disaster for industries that rely on website traffic. Increasingly, when using Google, users see an "AI overview" at the top of the search page, which answers their questions.

The feature just got an upgrade this past week, which will allow users of the Google search engine to ask follow-up questions of its AI overview, which can reduce the incentive to search through pages to find more details. Additionally, search results will allow Google users to build mini "agents" to search and scour the internet for you to perform tasks such as booking hotels and restaurants, per the Telegraph.

The head of search at Google said, “We’re entering the era of search agents."

Some believe that the search function may be approaching "Google Zero," or a future where Google will keep users on its page indefinitely instead of sending them to websites. This may also stop users from accessing AI from companies such as Anthropic or OpenAI.

“Google is leveraging its captive audience for search to keep them engaged with AI [features] to keep them on their platform longer rather than have them move over to ChatGPT or Claude,” said Gadjo Sevilla, an analyst for eMarketer. “It is pushing to be the default consumer AI through Google Search’s dominance.”

Johannes Beus, who is at the SEO company Sistrix, says that getting the top result on Google translates to a 27 percent click rate. But with the AI overview, that drops to 11 percent. “Zero-click searches will continue to expand,” he predicted.

News media companies and other web publishers may suffer the most from the moves Google is taking, as many of these companies often rely on traffic to perform. Google has defended the training of AI models on publishers, saying that “using publicly available information to learn is not stealing."

Google, however, has said that companies can benefit from what it sees as a growing market. Web publishers are still not happy, and about 8 percent are choosing to block Google completely so that Google cannot scrape their information.

If that trend were to continue, it would hurt Google's ability to provide that AI overview, so the internet search giant relies on website information to provide its search results.