New York Magazine no paywall: “By now, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered Google’s AI Overviews, possibly thousands of times. Appearing as blurbs at the top of search results, they attempt to settle your queries before you scroll — to offer answers, or relevant information, gleaned from websites that you no longer need to click on. The feature was officially rolled out at Google’s developer conference last year and had been in testing for quite some time before that; on the occasion of this year’s conference, the company characterized it as “one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade,” a strangely narrow claim that is almost certainly true: Google put AI summaries on top of everything else, for everyone, as if to say, “Before you use our main product, see if this works instead.”…From the very first use, however, AI Mode crystallized something about Google’s priorities and in particular its relationship to the web from which the company has drawn, and returned, many hundreds of billions of dollars of value. AI Overviews demoted links, quite literally pushing content from the web down on the page, and summarizing its contents for digestion without clicking…Meanwhile, AI Mode all but buries them, not just summarizing their content for reading within Google’s product but inviting you to explore and expand on those summaries by asking more questions, rather than clicking out. In many cases, links are retained merely to provide backup and sourcing, included as footnotes and appendices rather than destinations..”