Google is getting serious about establishing its dominance in gen-A.I. search. Its own offering, AI Overviews, has had something of a rocky start. But the show must go on, specifically traveling across over 100 countries and a half-dozen languages and counting.
The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post
- This expansion brings AI Overviews’ reach to over one billion users a month.
- Multiple languages also expands the reach that this platform has for users. Business owners, then, can rest assured that AI Overviews could have a truly multilingual reach.
- The currently supported languages are English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Users can toggle to their preferred language so long as they are in a country that supports AI Overviews.
- These gen-A.I. search engines are still not anywhere near acceptable, however, as reports of the search engines offering inaccurate, misleading, and even nefarious misinformation. For the most part, tech companies are looking to product-test these A.I. tools on a global scale, and make whatever necessary fixes come along, as they are revealed.
- Google is including links in AI Overviews in the hopes of continuing to drive users to websites, such as those of businesses that have come to rely on Google for getting online business.
Going Global with Gen-A.I. Search
What does it mean for generative A.I. to become a global feature in search?
The overriding idea is that A.I. will indeed make search more stimulating and therefore engaging. If search is more engaging, then users will continue to use it frequently, and perhaps even more than usual.
What that translates to is more interest from advertisers, and therefore more money to be made off of gen-A.I. search engines.
Whether it actually ends up being more informative is somewhat besides the point for tech companies invested in this endeavor. There may be more information in any search, but that does not necessarily mean the result is more informative. Ultimately the bottom line depends on the level of user engagement.
Just how exactly gen-A.I. search achieves that depends on multiple features inherent to this next step in search’s evolution.
The solution is to make search much more visually oriented, and feel more like the user is being served by technology. A search engine that feels more like a servant giving a visually stimulating presentation of findings. That, in contrast to the traditional search engine that feels like a tool for sifting through blue text links, with some images here and there.
As such, gen-A.I. search will be a more passive, service-oriented search experience that yields search results that are stimulating visual gestalts of images, videos, and concise text summaries. Oh, and let’s not forget the ads as well.
Ads Are Still a Priority for Google in AI Overviews
Of course, many business owners have been worried about the impact that AI Overviews could have on their advertising efforts.
However, Google’s significant reliance on advertising revenues from its search engine practically guarantees that it will assist businesses in many ways to get ads in front of searchers.
In AI Overviews, the ads appear below the search results. Prominent, but not intrusive, yet selectively culled based on relevance to the search itself. That way, the ads will seem like a natural extension of the A.I.-generated answer to the search query.
What business owners can also benefit from is the increasingly global reach of AI Overviews. If a business sells products internationally, then that can mean more opportunity to reach people across geographic as well as linguistic borders.
And with website discovery a greater priority for Google in AI Overviews, as it wants to retain its base of businesses that rely on Google search for business, companies will continue to benefit from Google search.
Other Great GO AI Blog Posts
GO AI the blog offers a combination of information about, analysis of, and editorializing on A.I. technologies of interest to business owners, with especial focus on the impact this tech will have on commerce as a whole.
On a usual week, there are multiple GO AI blog posts going out. Here are some notable recent articles:
In addition to our GO AI blog, we also have a blog that offers important updates in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), with blog posts like “Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies”.
