By Guardian community team
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 06:00:00
Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
“AI is driving the most significant upgrade of the Google Search experience ever,” Liz Reid, Google’s vice-president of search, wrote last August. In May, the company said more AI is coming.
As people grow accustomed to AI chatbots, they’re spending more time with Google’s and therefore more time on Google.com. Studies, media outlets and website owners alike are finding that people navigate less to sites beyond Google if an AI Overview can give them a good enough answer, even if the bot cites the sites that feed it. Clicks, also known as traffic, are often the…
