I don't understand how these AI summaries don't cannibalize Google's future profits. Google lives off ads that direct users to websites, websites they are doing their damnedest to make unnecessary. Who will be building future websites that nobody visits.

Because they also have a tech where AI-Agents can add product and service advertisements into these summaries [0].

They won an award for the paper, and the example they given was a "holiday" search, where a hotel inserted their name, and an airline company wedged themselves as the best way to go there.

If I can find it again, I'll print and stick its link all over walls to make sure everybody knows what Google is up to.

Edit: Found it!

[0]: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...

They make 99% of their profits on high-intent searches like "buy macbook" or "book trip to dc". They make much less on informational searches like "how to fix cors error on javascript" (most likely they make zero on it)

> Google lives off ads that direct users to websites, websites they are doing their damnedest to make unnecessary.

People will still spend the same amount of money to purchase goods and services. Advertisers will be willing to spend money to capture that demand.

Having their own websites is an optional part. It can also happen via Google Merchant Center, APIs, AI Agents, MCP servers, or other platforms.

I believe there will be fewer clicks going to the open web. But Google can simply charger a higher CPC for each click since the conversion rate is higher if a users clicks to buy after a 20 minute chat vs if a user clicks on an ad during every second or third Google search.

I'm sure they added it with reluctance, and they had to do it because LLM services are eating Google Search's lunch.

Google even put the AI snippet above their ads, so you know how bad it stings.

Only a tiny fraction of queries make all the money. You can tell this by noticing that most queries have no ads bidding for the keywords

Google is probably even more afraid of ChatGPT replacing it. So giving the user what they want is likely their way to try to hang on.

IMO a LLM is just a superior technology to a search engine in that it can understand vague questions, collate information and translate from other languages. In a lot of cases what I want isn't to find a particular page but to obtain information, and a LLM gets closer to that ideal.

It's nowhere near perfect yet but I won't be surprised if search engines go extinct in a decade or so.

Scrape other people's content and slap your own ads on it. Oldest story on the web.

They are undoubtedly cutting into profits. When I Google now, I wait for the AI summary (come to think of it, the fact that it takes 3-5 seconds to appear might not be organic...) and then click the references, rather than clicking through to search results. They're probably losing a LOT of reason for people to fight for SEO now. Why bother, Google users will just read the summary instead.

I suspect that they're hoping to "win" the AI war, get a monopoly, and then enshittify the whole thing. Good luck with that.