The Unstoppable Google

Inside Google a year ago, conventional wisdom held that artificial intelligence chatbots from OpenAI and Microsoft would shrink its lucrative search advertising business—and fast. Not only was that wrong, but the company’s annual event for advertisers on Tuesday showed how conversational AI can take that business to new heights.

Google executives said the company will start testing ads directly in AI-generated answers that summarize content from the web to answer certain queries rather than showing a list of links to other websites. The new conversational answers, AI Overviews, take inspiration from the way chatbots like ChatGPT and search startups like Perplexity answer questions. While Google’s answers are still prone to making mistakes, they seem to have gotten good enough that the company has launched them broadly in the U.S. and said they would expand globally this year.