Can Google Give A.I. Answers Without Breaking the Web?

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For the past year and a half since ChatGPT was released, a scary question has hovered over the heads of major online publishers: What if Google decides to overhaul its core search engine to feature generative artificial intelligence more prominently — and breaks our business in the process? The question speaks to one of the most fragile dependencies in today’s online media ecosystem. Most big publishers, including The New York Times, receive a significant chunk of traffic from people going to Google, searching for something and clicking on articles about it. That traffic, in turn, allows publishers to sell ads and subscriptions, which pay for the next wave of articles, which Google can then show to people who go searching for the next thing. The whole symbiotic cycle has worked out fine, more or less, for a decade or two. And even when Google announced its first generative A.I. chatbot, Bard, last year, some online media executives consoled themselves with the thought that Google wouldn’t possibly put such an erratic and unproven technology into its search engine, or risk mucking up its lucrative search ads business, which generated $175 billion in revenue last year. But change is coming. At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, Google announced that it would start showing A.I.-generated answers — which it calls “A.I. overviews” — to hundreds of millions of users in the United States this week. More than a billion users will get them by the end of the year, the company said.