After a full year of testing, Google has officially announced the launch of its AI-powered search capabilities to all users, the company announced at the Google I/O 2024 developer conference.
Google first announced SGE Genetic Search a year ago, a new experience that combines generative AI with search results to provide snippets and answers to search terms based on information available in search results.
Starting today, Google is making AI Preview, which generates search experiences, a default search option in the search engine.
With Gemini Assistant, Google displays a snippet of search results and optionally adds some of the links it uses to create the snippet. Then other traditional search results are displayed.
Google has announced plans to make the feature available to all users in the US starting today, with other countries expected to follow soon.
The company expects "more than a billion" users to have access to the AI Overview feature by the end of 2024.
Users will not be able to completely disable the AI search feature, but Google will add the ability to ignore AI answers and show only links.
These features promise to improve the search experience in ways that users have not experienced since the beginning of the Internet era. However, one of the concerns associated with it relates to its impact on websites that generate a lot of traffic from search engines.
It is estimated that these sites could lose up to 25% of their search engine traffic over the next two years due to these changes.
A number of links that appear in AI Overview search snippets received more clicks than links in traditional searches, Google said, noting that the company "continues to focus" on sending traffic to publishers and creators.
Google also announced new features it is testing in search, including simplifying the language used in featured snippets, organizing search results, using video in search, and more.