I think this will be one of those things that the hacker news crowd lambasts and calls a mistake but will either be neutral or seen as a positive to your average user.

I think you underestimate how many users loathe that "Generated with AI" box. But for me the bigger question is why they're going all in on this instead of a gradual rollout or a new tool offering.

Yeh, my sense as well. I'm just out of college, and can tell you people my age use AI all the time and will probably be happy with this change. There is a diehard anti-AI group, but it seemed smaller all the time over the past couple years.

The average user may be fine with it (though I think many will not). But given this is basically killing the open web, I don't see where Google plans to get the results to feed this AI thing in a year or so

Agree, but the average user trusts the AI knowledge box as expert summary, even though clicking through often reveals contrary information, so this is going to be a net negative overall for a while…

The average user makes fun of how bad the Google AI generated responses are. I somehow don't think they're going to embrace a plan for that slop to be the only thing available.