I resent Google (and other AIs) scraping and repurposing all the copyright material from my software product website, without even asking. But, if I block them, there is very little chance I am going to get mentioned in their AI summary.
Or asking if you want to pay to remove false information that they generate which makes you look bad.
Honestly, publishers should just allow it. If the concern is lost traffic, it could be worse — the “source” link in the summary is still above all the other results on the page. If the concern is misinformation, that’s another issue but could hopefully be solved by rewriting content, submitting accuracy reports, etc.
I do think Google needs to allow publishers to opt out of AI summary without also opting out of all “snippets” (although those have the same problem of cannibalizing clicks, so presumably if you’re worried about it for the AI summary then you should be worried about it for any other snippet too).
If Google doesn’t take you to someone else’s website or app, they can’t charge advertisers any money.
They are doing it but it is less lucrative than the non-AI search engine.
Like video streaming, they are forced into this via new competition.
E.g., ChatGPT is the marketshare leader in the new version of search engines, local AI models + ChatGPT for complex queries is the default “search engine” of Apple Intelligence, not Google on Safari.
Google’s risk here is that they’re about to lose everyone who isn’t running queries from their own platforms who still overwhelmingly use Google for their “general life queries” today (Apple users on web browsers, Windows users on web browsers).
One would think that they have a plan why they are doing it. They are the ones seeing the numbers.
We can speculate here about their risks or the stupidity of the plan... but i wouldn't say Google zero is some conspiration theory - flawed strategy maybe. I don't think people would be surprised if google.com became big "ask gemini" field. Many users probably wouldn't even notice.
It’s kind of like how the movie industry killed their Blu-ray, DVD, and theater ticket sales in favor of streaming.
Or how digital download/streaming music took decades to match the pre-Napster revenue peak of the industry. It’s still barely ahead of that level and that’s before adjusting for inflation.