from Ars Technica:

The feature, renamed “AI Overview,” is here now, and it feels like the biggest change to Google Search ever. The top of many results (especially questions) are now dominated by an AI box that scrapes the web and gives you a sometimes-correct summary without needing to click on a single result.

When Google decides you have an AI-appropriate query, it now takes a lot of scrolling to see web results. Google scrolls infinitely, so there are no “pages” anymore, but let’s consider a “page” to be a full browser viewport height: The first page is an AI overview that takes up half the screen and then another answer box extracted from some website. Page two is a “People also ask” box suggesting other queries, then one search result, then a box for videos. Page three is the bottom half of the video box, then a “Discussions and forums” section with Reddit and Quora posts. It’s not until page four and miles of scrolling that we get the traditional 10 blue links.

No one should underestimate the magnitude of this change.

Last year at the #beBETA conference in Berlin, I saw a fascinating presentation by Prof. Dr. Thomas Höppner (Partner Hausfeld), a lawyer specializing in publishing, who warned in no uncertain terms about the “zero click” reading habits of the future.

He said that from visiting websites directly in 1994 to clicking on Google/Facebook links to “zero click reading” (never visiting the site, no revenue generated), it has been a continuous evolution over the last 30 years. In 2022, there were already more than 50% “zero click readers”, and AI will greatly accelerate this development. In his view of the future, this is the biggest threat AI poses to publishers.

One year later, we are already there.