Google's destruction of its core product continues with AI overviews launching in Australia

BTTR is independent, but we may earn money when you purchase through links on our site.

We've known it was coming, but today Google announced it had switched on AI overviews for search results in Australia.

Despite example after example of terrible results from AI summaries, Google has doubled down on its effort to make its core search product emphatically worse. Not just for customers, either, but for the small businesses that have relied on search traffic to succeed.

In its announcement post, Google claims the opposite, of course.

Helping people discover content from publishers, businesses and creators remains central to our approach with AI Overviews in Search – both globally and in Australia. Since the feature first launched in the US in May, we’ve introduced more prominent ways to show links to relevant websites within AI Overviews, with a right-hand link display on desktop and a similar experience on mobile, accessible by tapping the site icons in the upper right. And earlier this month, we started launching in-line links that appear directly within the text of AI Overviews, making it easier for people to visit sites that interest them. In our testing, both of these updates drove an increase in traffic to supporting websites compared to the previous designs.
- Google Australia Blog

It's an incredibly easy thing for Google to say because it's near impossible to prove one way or the other.

The truth is that when Google is amalgamating data from multiple sources using AI, there's simply less reason for a searcher to click through to a publisher's site for the information.

One of the leading voices in the SEO community around Google's AI summaries, Lily Ray, ran a poll on LinkedIn recently to ask whether people clicked more or less through AI summaries.

A LinkedIn poll is far from scientific, so don't assume the data is accurate. But as an indication of sentiment, it's pretty clear from the 1,700 votes that a much larger proportion of people click less, compared to those who click more or the same.

Monopoly gunna monopolise

It's no real surprise Google is pushing this technology that nobody asked for, as it goes further into keeping people locked into Google, rather than heading elsewhere.

And with more people not leaving the search engine, Google has a larger audience for its ads.

Google has gotten into a bunch of trouble for its monopolistic tendencies. While we can hope that the company is forced to be broken apart to better enable competition, it will still be years before any meaningful change is forced upon it.

In the meantime, unfortunately, there's no absolute way to turn off AI summaries. There is a "Web" filter available in the search results that will show you the key links without any AI summaries, or featured snippets, but it's still a secondary step after you complete your search.

Of course, the other alternative is to just stop using Google altogether. Here's a list of Search Engine alternatives.