The new Google AI overview layout is a small win for publishers

Google’s AI summaries got off to a rocky start, but that hasn’t stopped the tech giant from forging ahead and forcing AI-generated summaries onto your search results—whether it likes it or not.

On Thursday, Google announced new updates to AI Overviews, some of which might make publishers a little happier. Starting today, Google is moving the relevant sites section of its AI Overviews to the right side of the page. This is a change from the previous interface, which sat below the AI-generated summary and featured the sites more prominently. Now, if you Google something like “how do I remove stains from walls?”, relevant pages will appear right next to the summary. Other sites will fill the page below in the classic format.

The new AI Overview interface displays websites more prominently on the page.
Source: Screenshot: Mashable / Google

On mobile, relevant sites are slightly less highlighted, but you can browse them by tapping the site icons in the top right.

Find relevant websites by tapping the icon.
Source: Screenshot: Mashable / Google

Tapping the icons will display relevant AI overview sites.
Source: Screenshot: Mashable / Google

In addition, Google is testing a feature in its test labs that links directly to relevant websites. “The goal is to make it easier for people to visit the sites they are interested in and reduce the effort even further,” Hema Budaraju told Mashable. “This experiment has shown positive results: these links allow people to connect and, of course, lead to more traffic to publishers’ sites.”

Aside from the wrong answers, like the infamous taped pizza debacle, the debut of Google’s AI Overviews felt like a big middle finger to publishers who rely on search traffic and already have a fractious relationship with the dominant search engine. “This will have disastrous consequences for our traffic as Google commoditizes it to better meet users’ queries and provide even less incentive to click through so we can monetize our content,” Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, told CNN when AI Overviews was first announced in May. In fact, Marc McCollum, chief innovation officer at Raptive, a monetization company for publishers, told the Related PressSearch traffic could drop by 25 percent, costing many publishers their main source of income.

But that was then. Whether Google was bowing to publisher backlash or simply wanted a better user experience is unclear. However, with its announcement, Google is deliberately positioning itself and AI Overviews as a channel to find out more by clicking on publisher websites. Google claims that AI Overviews have contributed to a “greater variety of websites” and a “higher quality” of clicks on those websites. We’d love to get our hands on that data, but unfortunately we’ll have to take Google’s word for it.

Perhaps emboldened by its unpublished results, Google is expanding AI Overviews to six countries: the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, with local language support. Labs users can also test two new additional features. Starting today, Labs users can save specific AI Overview answers for easy access. Users can also “simplify” an answer if the AI ​​Overview is too technical or complicated for beginners.