Google's AI search: AI overviews in more countries and more prominent links

Google's AI answers will soon be available in more countries. There will be more links in the continuous texts in future – they will be of "higher quality".

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Aug 16, 2024 at 11:31 pm CEST

3 min. read

By

Eva-Maria Weiß

This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

Google calls its AI-generated answer texts, which appear above the regular search results, AI Overviews. Previously only available in the USA, six more countries are now being added - although the EU is still excluded. There and in the Search Labs test environment, innovations are also being introduced regarding links.

In addition to the USA, AI Overviews will also be available in the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. Although the EU has very similar legislation to that planned in the UK in the form of the AI Act, people in the member states will still not have access to the AI search function. Google justifies this with regulatory uncertainties. What exactly they mean by this, however, is not entirely clear. Some people see Google's and Meta's reluctance to provide AI functions primarily as an attempt to exert pressure on legislators.

AI Overviews have been in regular operation since May. Previously, they could only be viewed in the test environment. Not every request to Google is answered with an AI-generated text. Google decides whether an AI response is appropriate depending on the question. According to reports, this is only the case in around 15 percent of queries. For example, people search for websites on Google by just entering the name, or they search for information that Google has stored in the Knowledge Graph - no language model needs to be used to retrieve this information.

Better clicks for publishers thanks to AI?

Nevertheless, Google writes on its blog post on AI Overviews: "Already, people are asking longer questions, diving deeper into complex subjects and uncovering new perspectives – which means more opportunities for people to discover content from publishers, businesses and creators." Google claims that if people click on the related and further links in an AI answer, these clicks will be of higher quality for the websites – "meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit."

New links are therefore being introduced that can be accessed via a right-click in the body text, mobile via a link icon on the side. Previously, the links to the websites from which the content was used for the AI Overviews were located below the answer text. According to Google, the links have even led to higher traffic for the websites than the previous link lists. Publishers and content creators, on the other hand, are worried that they will lose clicks and thus the opportunity to earn money with advertising on their own site.

There are also new test functions in the Search Labs for the USA. On the one hand, AI Overviews can be saved for later. The answer text can also be simplified. This should help if you are entirely new to a topic and don't know your way around.