New opportunities, control and insights for website owners
People are increasingly turning to generative AI tools to help them find, sort through and understand information. As the way people want to look for information changes, we're designing our features in Search to highlight the web, while also providing new resources, insights and control for website owners to navigate these shifts.
New opportunities with generative AI in Search
With our generative AI Search features, people are more satisfied with Search, and they are searching more often. AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, while AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users. And people are asking Search entirely new kinds of questions, creating new opportunities for brands, publishers and creators to reach people.
Features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are designed to help people find and visit great websites, and to help publishers and websites strengthen their audiences. These features include prominent links to websites, and we’re continuing to upgrade these experiences to make it easier for people to use generative AI as a jumping-off point. For example:
- We’ve increased the number of inline links directly within responses and added helpful website previews to encourage people to click through.
- We recently brought Preferred Sources into AI Overviews and AI Mode and launched new subscription labels in these features, so people can choose the websites that they want to see more prominently.
- Looking ahead, we're continuing to experiment with a range of new link designs in our AI experiences to make them more useful.
In addition, we’ve shared updated guidance to help website owners improve the visibility of their sites in generative AI Search features. This includes tips on the importance of providing unique, non-commodity content for readers, and information for websites about how to organize their content, create a good page experience and provide high quality images and video to enhance their pages.
New control and insights for website owners
We’re also actively listening to feedback from publishers and creators, and engaging with regulators like the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to ensure website owners have the right tools as user preferences evolve. Today, we're beginning to test a new control that lets website owners manage how their links and content appear in generative AI Search features.
With this new toggle in Search Console, website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features (like AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover). Sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features. This control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features. This work builds on our long history of designing tools, like snippet controls and Google-Extended, that give websites more choice.
We’re also starting to roll out new insights for website owners in Search Console about the appearance of their pages in generative AI Search features. These insights include impressions metrics and information about which pages appear in AI responses and in what countries. We're continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful to inform their strategies, and we’ll introduce additional metrics over time.
We are beginning to roll these features out to a subset of website owners in the UK, allowing for thorough testing before rolling them out to website owners globally. As AI opens up new opportunities for discovery, we'll keep improving our experiences to help people explore the web, and keep building tools for websites to better engage their audiences.
