AI search & the shift towards inauthenticity & commercial interests

Historically, Google Search has driven innovation by rewarding high-quality content with visibility and traffic. In the last article in this series, we talked about the risks of Google AI over-personalizing results and reinforcing filter bubbles. 

In this article, we’ll look at the opposite risk. If Google’s new AI results skew away from diversity and towards standardized results that favor big brands and consensus views, it could limit creativity and innovation and accelerate the commodification of the web.

Some may find this concern naive because the internet is already very commodified, but historically, even small websites and businesses believed that they had a chance to rank and drive traffic. The web has long been seen as a digital marketplace of ideas. Yet because AI language models naturally look for consensus, being surfaced in AI search when you fall outside the mainstream could become much harder.

AI systems & consensus

You can look at all of the companies that lost all their traffic and/or rankings in the Helpful Content Updates to illustrate this point. Small affiliate websites that worked hard to add value to the internet with product reviews, articles, and comparisons were mostly wiped out in organic rankings. 

Now, to drive traffic through Google, many of these companies have to buy ads and arbitrage their earnings, or shift focus to platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Most have chosen the latter, abandoning efforts to rank in Google altogether. And while not all sites that lost visibility in the Helpful Content Updates were entirely editorially written, high-value, human-oriented content, some definitely were.

The problem is this: if the types of companies go out of business or their sites disappear from the web, the corpus of information indexed by Google—and now used in AI search—will become less diverse. Forcing smaller publishers to pay to migrate entirely to social platforms could further reduce diversity in the web’s knowledge base. If independent creators are consistently excluded from rankings, they’ll have less incentive to share their unique perspectives anywhere but social media.

Social media may be an intentional counterbalance in Google’s plan, which is somewhat encouraging. Google recently announced that it will be ranking and showing YouTube Shorts in Discover, and already includes a ‘Short Video’ tab on many results. It has also shown increasing interest in ranking posts from Reddit and LinkedIn. And maybe this is not accidental. Maybe, in Google’s view, unique and new opinions should come from more independent creators, while mainstream or consensus views come from bigger companies with better brand recognition. Only time will tell.

The impact of advertising

Ads in AI Overviews have already begun to roll out, and when they are fully released next quarter, then we will really get a peek into Google’s plans for monetizing their AI. Until then, we can look at the…