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.
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