By External Contributor
Publication Date: 2026-10-05 10:23:00
Since its launch in 1998, Google, the world’s leading search engine, has transformed how people find information online. For years, search results appeared as ranked lists of sources: Google decided what to show, but users decided what to read and whom to trust.
However, the advent of Google AI Overviews has fundamentally changed that paradigm. Today, when a user searches anything from “How long do I boil eggs?” to “How do I lower my cholesterol?” there’s a good chance the response will lead with a single artificial intelligence (AI)-generated summary. This change gives Google unprecedented editorial control over what users read and know, according to Jacob Montgomery, a professor of political science in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Google is now writing answers, not just ranking them, and it does this for billions of searches,” Montgomery said. “Yet we know very little about how the system works….
