Today, I’m talking to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the Google I/O developer conference last week. Google’s focus during the conference was AI, of course — Google is building AI into virtually all of its products. My personal favorite is the new AI search in Google Photos that lets you ask things like, “What’s my license plate number?” and get an answer back from your entire photo library. All in all, Google executives said “AI” more than 120 times during the keynote — we counted. But there was one particular announcement at I/O that’s sending shockwaves around the web: Google is rolling out what it calls AI Overviews in Search to everyone in the United States by this week and around the world to more than a billion users by the end of the year. That means when you search for something on Google, you’ll get AI-powered results at the top of the page for a number of queries. The company literally describes this as “letting Google do the Googling for you.” Google has been testing this for a year now, in what it called the Search Generative Experience, so you may have already seen a version of this — but now it’s here, and it will change the web as we know it. Until now, Google’s ecosystem has been based on links to everyone else’s content: you type something into a search box, you see some links, and you click one. That sends traffic to websites, which their owners can try to monetize in various ways, and ideally everyone wins. Google is by far the biggest source of traffic on the web today, so if it starts keeping that traffic for itself by answering questions with AI, that will change or potentially even destroy the internet ecosystem as we know it. The News/Media Alliance, which represents a bunch of fancy news publishers, put out a press release calling AI previews in search “catastrophic to our traffic.”

Full Q&A : Google CEO, Sundar Pichai on Google I/O announcements, AI Overviews’ high clickthrough rates, competing with OpenAI, future of search, AI advancements, and more