Businesses, from retailers to news publishers, currently rely on web traffic funnelled their way from Google’s search results. Firms can pay for prime spots on the results lists, as a form of advertising.
A shift towards AI-generated responses, containing fewer direct links, could up-end that model.
Ms Budaraju said the firm had not yet finalised how advertising revenue for AI Mode would work, or whether firms would be able to pay to be included in the response.
But it is already concerning some businesses, who say people are less likely to click through to their websites via the links contained in an AI summary.
Ms Budaraju disagreed with this characterisation.
“I would say that I think people are going to use these technologies to unlock newer information-seeking journeys,” she said.
“These kind of questions didn’t happen before, and now you made it really possible for people to express anything a lot more naturally.”
The Daily Mail claims the number of people who click its links from Google search results has fallen by around 50% on both desktop and mobile traffic since Google introduced its AI Overview feature.
And a recent study by the Pew Research Centre suggested that people only clicked a link once in every 100 searches when there was an AI summary at the top of the page. Google argues the research methodology in that study was flawed.
