MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — At its annual I/O keynote Tuesday, Google introduced AI Mode, a new chatbot interface that replaces the traditional list of ten blue links with a single confident paragraph synthesized from the work of writers who will, statistically, no longer be writing by Christmas.
The feature, demoed onstage to a standing audience of developers and one extremely tired antitrust lawyer, allows users to type a question and receive an answer assembled from across the open web, with the helpful additional benefit that they will never again need to visit any of the websites that produced it. Early users described the experience as ‘fast,’ ‘fluent,’ and ‘haunted by the ghost of every recipe blogger who ever lived.’
‘AI Mode is about meeting users where they are,’ said Google VP of Search Aanya Krishnamurthy, gesturing at a slide that depicted users where they are, which was apparently no longer on the websites Google has spent twenty-five years training people to find. ‘We’re not replacing the open web. We’re just summarizing it so completely that visiting it would feel redundant.’
The chatbot will continue to cite its sources via small superscript footnotes, several of which lead to 404 pages, two of which lead to a Pinterest board last updated in 2017, and one of which leads to a personal blog whose author, reached for comment, said she had taken the site down in March because nobody was visiting it anymore.
‘I wrote a fairly good post about composting in apartments,’ said former blogger Diane Reisler, who now works in fulfillment at a regional warehouse. ‘Google’s AI seems to remember it better than I do. It quotes me. I’d love to know where.’
Publishers reached at the conference expressed cautious optimism that AI Mode would drive ‘a new kind of engagement,’ by which they meant the engagement of watching their referral traffic die in real time on a dashboard. Several said they had been invited to a Google partner program in which they continue producing original journalism, and Google continues not sending readers to it, but with a logo.
Asked whether the model had been trained on copyrighted material without permission, Krishnamurthy said the question was ‘a great one’ and then answered a different question. Asked what publishers should do if their traffic collapses to zero, she suggested they ‘lean into AI-native formats,’ a phrase she repeated four times without elaborating, in the manner of someone whose job depends on no one asking what it means.
The new feature begins rolling out this week in the United States, where it will replace search results for an estimated several billion queries per day, including the query ‘is the open web dying,’ which AI Mode answered confidently in the negative, citing a source that was, on inspection, itself.