AI & the future of web search

How browsers assisted by artificial intelligence are looking to set the tone for our future digital lives

- DAVID CROOKES

Enter a search query into Google these days, and you don’t necessarily have to wade through the results and click through to a website. At the top of the screen, you’ll likely see an AI Overview that gives you all the information you need. It can save you lots of time, preventing the need to trawl through websites, and it’s a prime example of how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way we both look for answers and consume the ever-growing amount of data at our fingertips.

AI Overviews launched in the US in May 2024, and the feature has had a huge impact on the number of visitors received by websites. Aside from them taking up space where results would normally reside, a report by the Pew Research Center says the number of clicks to a website can halve when an AI Overview is shown.

Such findings are not uncommon. A study of 23 websites by Gilad David Maayan, CEO and founder of Agile SEO, has shown that the summaries are causing an 18 to 64% drop in organic traffic, while analysts at Bain & Company say that 80% of search users are relying on AI summaries at least 40% of the time. The latter has also shown that as many as 60% of searches are ending at the overviews. For websites relying on constant streams of traffic for revenue, this is bad news.

And yet it is only the beginning. Search engine users are becoming used to such shortcuts, and there are no imminent signs that they’ll be scaled back. If anything, we’re going to be seeing AI used more widely in relation to finding information online and, if we’re judging by recent developments, it will involve big changes to the web browser as we know it, with plans to overhaul not only the current user experience, but to change the way we discover information, potentially forever.

INTELLIGENT BROWSING