Google Is Reaping the Rewards of Its Unfair AI Advantage
The search giant capitalizes on its broad access to websites while content creators lose visitors and revenue.
Google is leveraging its dominant position in search to force success in AI.
Photographer: Camille Cohen/AFP/Getty Images
With 2 billion monthly users in 200 countries, Google’s AI Overviews can claim to be the most popular generative artificial-intelligence product yet released to the public. The short summaries generated by the company’s Gemini AI model have turned Google from search engine to answer engine, settling the nerves of investors who were worried that ChatGPT was going to smash Google’s business model to pieces.
Then again, to describe those billions as “users,” as parent company Alphabet Inc. did when announcing its quarterly earnings last week, is perhaps disingenuous. No one consciously uses AI Overviews — it’s just there when users perform a regular search on Google, something billions of them have done several times a day for two decades. That’s one key advantage Google has over its competitors: People already associate the service with finding things out. The company has every right to capitalize on that reputation, one it built off the back of genuine innovation and quality (though, admittedly, it was later solidified with illegal multibillion-dollar deals to prevent competition).