Google’s latest changes to AI Overviews make it look more like OpenAI’s search engine prototype as competition heats up

Meanwhile, Google is embedding AI into its already-established search engine. Google also offers a chatbot experience with its virtual assistant Gemini.

The two companies also differ in their approach to publisher deals. OpenAI has signed a number of deals with news publications, exchanging financial compensation in exchange for the ability to train AI on their content library.

The deals come amid concerns from publishers around the impact AI products could have on their readership, as well as any scraping of their online work without permission to train the large language models powering AI products. AI-powered answer engine Perplexity faced backlash, for example, when it was accused of regurgitating news content without providing attribution to publishers.

While Google also seems to be taking steps towards expanding attribution, it hasn’t taken the same approach in signing deals with US publishers. However, Google is paying Reddit for the ability to train its AI on the company’s vast trove of online posts. The tech giant also announced in 2023 that it signed licensing deals with 1,500 news publications in the EU due to the EU Copyright Directive.

But as companies continue to experiment with what makes a strong generative AI search product, publishers have been watching to see how the concept of linking to the information cited is implemented. And from a user standpoint, AI models are known to hallucinate, so products that reveal where the AI is getting its information from can be helpful when fact-checking purposes, or to further explore a topic.

Budaraju said in a statement that Google will continue testing different ways of presenting information, while “prioritizing approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites.”

“Showing links to supporting web pages directly within AI Overviews is driving higher traffic to publisher sites,” Budaraju said in a statement about the experiment.

Google’s update to AI Overviews comes as it rolls out AI Overviews to six new countries, including the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil. The updated version with the links is available in all of the countries it’s launched in, as well as for Search Labs users in over 120 countries and territories.

Google is also experimenting with new tools in Search Labs for English queries in the US, like the ability to save AI Overviews results and simplify the language in the responses.