Google is opening up access to its AI Overviews feature to a half-dozen new countries and expanding the search tool with a few additional options. AI Overviews uses Google Gemini’s artificial intelligence models to create a summary based on the search results for a user’s query. Those summaries will now begin appearing for users in the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.
This year, AI Overviews made waves at Google I/O, when the tech giant boasted that it would help users understand complex topics without having to visit multiple websites to find what they were looking for. Google has since claimed that AI Overviews has led to increased engagement with various sources across the web and has declared the experiment a success with the rollout in other countries. Depending on where a user is located, they will see the summaries in the local language.
“We’ve been extensively testing how people respond to updates to Search. Since the US launch, we’ve found that people who use AI Overviews use Search more and are more satisfied with their results,” Google explained in a blog post. “People looking for help with complex topics are more engaged and continue to turn to AI Overviews. And we’re seeing even higher engagement from younger users, ages 18-24, when they use Search with AI Overviews.”
Google is showing a lot of faith in AI Overviews in this expansion. This is a bit surprising, considering recent evidence that Google was slowing down promotion of the feature a bit. AI Overviews not only appeared less frequently, but took up a smaller percentage of the screen. But opening the door to new languages and locations means that Google has solved the problem of absurd, incorrect, and even dangerous answers reported by some.
AI Reviews Just For You
As part of the expansion, Google has been playing around with the look of AI Overviews and is testing out some ideas for new features. For example, there’s a new link display on the right-hand side for desktop users to make it easier to see relevant websites while browsing AI Overviews. Those links are visible on mobile when you tap the site icons at the top right of the screen. The company is also testing embedding links within the text of the summary produced by AI Overviews. Google doesn’t want to antagonize the companies whose data is used for AI Overviews, so they’re hoping the hyperlinks will drive more traffic to publishers’ sites.
On the more experimental side, Google has added two new features to the “AI Summary and More” portion of its Search Labs testing platform. One tool you can try will let you save an AI summary to refer to later. By clicking the new save button below an AI summary, you can save it and come back to it whenever you need to. The other test is to simplify the summary provided by the AI summary. If the text composed by the AI is difficult to follow, you can click a button to make the language more accessible or easier to understand for someone unfamiliar with the topic. For now, both tests are only available in the US.
Search remains crucial to Google, though following a recent court ruling claiming the company is violating antitrust laws, that may change. For now, AI improvement is clearly where the industry is headed, one way or another. If Google wants to remain synonymous with finding things online, it will need useful AI tools. It’s hard to say whether AI Overviews is the perfect app for that purpose, though posing that question to Google yielded an overview that was very confident it would “lead AI search features.”
