Google Adds Ads to AI Overviews as It Boosts AI in Search!
Google will begin to show ads in AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries it supplies for certain Google Search queries, and will add links to relevant web pages for some of those summaries as well. It’s also rolling out AI-organized search results pages in the U.S. this week. The increasing prominence of AI in Google’s core search product is an effort to keep users from shifting to alternatives like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Perplexity, which use AI to answer many of the questions traditionally thrown at Google. Perplexity said in May that its worldwide user base had grown to more than 85 million web visits — a drop in the bucket compared to Google, but impressive considering that Perplexity launched only two years ago. Since its launch this spring, AI Overviews has been the subject of much controversy, going viral for its dubious statements and questionable advice (like adding glue to pizza). A recent report from SE Ranking, an SEO platform, found that AI Overviews cites websites that “are
