Earlier this summer, AI Overviews made headlines across the U.S. — mostly for the wrong reasons.
The new Google search feature offers up AI-generated answers to queries, synthesizing sources on the web and filtering them through Google’s own large language model, Gemini. In the days after its U.S. roll out, journalists quickly took to social media to pan the product, screenshotting Overviews that were filled with factual inaccuracies and outright delusions (among many fails, Google prompted users to run with scissors for cardio and bathe with a toaster to relieve stress). Overviews became the new face for rushed AI adoption and the ways generative technologies are being stretched beyond their limits.
Lurking beneath the viral tweets, though, was a genuine anxiety among journalists and news publishers who worried that Overviews was using (and often misrepresenting) their editorial content to output its answers, all while pushing links to outlets out of view and disincentivizing users to click through to article pages.
Despite an initial statement from Google that it would scale back the feature in late May, three months post-launch it’s clear that AI Overviews are here to stay. On August 15, Overviews was released in six more countries, including the U.K., Japan, India, and Brazil. Searches in Japanese, Hindi and Portuguese have also begun surfacing Overviews.
News publishers around the world are now faced with figuring out how Overviews will impact their organic search traffic and whether or not they should adjust their search strategy accordingly. To begin to answer that question, I asked seven leading audience strategists and SEO experts in the U.S. how they’re thinking about this new phase in search and whether they’ve already made changes to their audience strategy since May.
Their responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
There is also no data provided by Google around AI Overviews — what search queries these show up on, what traffic is driven by AI Overview links vs. other features, etc. — which makes it difficult for publishers to assess performance and make strategy decisions.
Whenever a platform, search or otherwise, makes a substantial change it’s right to be worried about the impact. There are still so many unknowns about AI Overviews — including what topics and types of queries it will trigger on moving forward — that we’re watching and evaluating any changes in our site performance. That said, it is our mission to provide our audiences with original, rigorously reported news, analysis, perspectives and service journalism to help them understand the world. It is not often that a zero-click answer will be enough for the audience’s we are trying to engage.
I do think this will cut into our organic search traffic, but it’s too early to tell how much. There are a lot of SEO experts that have more capacity to track these developments than individual publishers do — we just have too many other things on our plates. Some experts are saying that guardrails around hard news topics seem to be working. Other studies show plenty of news-related queries yielding AI results, in some cases without any links or citations. It’s really hard to get an accurate read right now.
Outside of search, we want to use every opportunity to highlight the humans behind our content. It’s going to be more important than ever for audience members to understand that a piece of reporting came from a real local journalist, someone who lives in their community and cares about it.
We have started to see more AI Overview answers coming from the top ranked search items, which is a good thing. But the biggest problem, in my opinion, is the competition entering this space. Google has so far committed to not having as many AI Overviews in news searches, but competitors are entering the space, and this market pressure could change that policy. When consumers see overviews, we need to make sure they understand that they may not be seeing the best representation of the information.
I also think the one point that doesn’t get talked about a lot is the environmental impact of these types of rolled out AI Overviews. The amount of compute needed to produce these at scale is hurting our environment, because the amount of power to these highly advanced chips are emitting more carbon than hundreds of households in a year and consuming more clean water. We have to really think about the cost of progress, how it affects all of us as this space evolves.
Search has long been a major way people discover new websites, and a step on their way to becoming devoted readers. If Google decides its best way forward is to keep all of those readers on its own site, there will be a lot of sites that have to figure out other ways to find new audiences.
When it comes to search, our audience strategy has pretty much remained consistent. We continue to watch, track, experiment and try to figure out the best way to bring L.A. Times content to both our existing and potential audience. We are always talking about new ways of delivering content to our readers and how we can best serve them on our own platforms and through social and other sites where people get information, but I can’t say that is in response to AI Overviews.
