AI eats the web
Scott Rosenberg | Axios
May 17, 2024

[snip]

Google's shift toward AI-generated search results, displacing the familiar list of links, is rewiring the internet — and could accelerate the decline of the 30+-year-old World Wide Web.

Why it matters: A world where Google answers most questions in a single machine voice makes online life more convenient — and duller.

The change also threatens to cut into Google's revenue from search ads, and starve future AIs of the human data they'll need.

Driving the news: Google has steadily ramped up its AI-generated results since ChatGPT came on the scene in late 2022, and this week it announced it was rolling out "AI Overviews" to everyone in the U.S.

That means the world's most popular search engine will answer many or most queries with a paragraph or two written by generative AI.

This system still relies on web-based information, but it doesn't nourish the creators of that information with users' visits.

Friction point: Publishers and retailers are terrified that this will cut deep into their referral traffic and decimate their businesses.

But there's even deeper damage likely to be wreaked by Google's shift.

By making it even less inviting for humans to contribute to the web's collective pool of knowledge, Google's summary answers could also leave its own and everyone else's AI tools with less accurate, less timely, and less interesting information.