Has Google subtly aligned with Elon Musk on sources for information?
It might open the door for a hopeful human-centered vision? I'm still processing. Let's process together! And think about what it means for our own media habits.
Yesterday the technology podcast Decoder dropped a pretty meaty and interesting interview with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google.
Within it are some profound statements about how Sundar/Google view information and how humans find it.
It’s worth parsing for anyone who wants to take an active role in thinking about how/what information you’re finding and consuming and how you might use it to get better.
Google’s Relationship with the Internet
Sundar says that Google crawlers now find 45% more webpages than they did two years ago. The Verge Editor-in-Chief, Nilay Patel, asks how much of that might be attributable to AI slop and asks about the relationship between Google as the discovery engine for information and the publishers who create high-quality information. This leads to this exchange:
Nilay Patel: Is there public data that shows that AI overviews and AI mode actually send more traffic out than the previous search engine results page?
Sundar Pichai: The way we look at it is... I mean, obviously, we take a lot of... We are definitely sending traffic to a wider range of sources and publishers. And because just like we’ve done over 25 years, we’ve been through the same with featured snippets, the quality of... It’s higher-quality referral traffic, too. And we can observe it because the time that people spend is one metric. And there are other ways by which we measure the quality of our outbound traffic, and it’s also increasing. And overall, through this transition, I think AI is also growing, and the growth compounds over time. So whenever we have worked through these transitions, it ends up posted. That’s how Google has worked for 25 years, and we end up sending more traffic over time. So that’s how I would expect all this to play out.
Nilay Patel: So why do you think that there is so much general economic turmoil on that side of the house? If you’re sending more traffic and the goal over time is to make sure that that works… We’re a year into it, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten better over there.
Sundar Pichai: No, look, we are sending traffic to a broader source of people. People may be surfacing more content, looking at more content, so someone may individually see less. There are all kinds of... At the end of the day, we are reflecting what users want. If you do the wrong thing, users won’t use our product and go somewhere else. And so you have all these dynamics underway, and I think we have genuinely… We took a long time designing AI overviews, and we are constantly iterating in a way that we prioritize this, sources, and sending traffic to the web.
Two days before this interview, John Herrman at NYMag wrote up a pretty succinct counterpoint: “AI Overviews demoted links, quite literally pushing content from the web down on the page, and summarizing its contents for digestion without clicking”
We can all clearly see what John sees. AI Overviews pushing links to websites into peripheral reference sections and chatbots completely rewriting what they've found elsewhere without attributionor links. But can both things be true? We can't really disprove Sundar's statement that Google is sending more traffic to a broader universe of sources/webpages without access to their internal data.
But Sundar give another answer that reveals what might be coming next.
Where Google and X Align?
Here is another exchange from the interview:
Nilay Patel: Can you detect if that volume increase is because more pages are generated by AI or not? This is the thing I may be worried about the most, right?
Sundar Pichai: It’s a good question. We generally have many techniques in search to try and understand the quality of a page, including whether it was machine-generated, etc. That doesn’t explain the trend we are seeing.
Generally, there are more web pages, right? At an underlying level, I think that’s an interesting phenomenon. I think everybody as a creator like you are at The Verge, has to do everything in a cross-platform, cross-format way.
I’ve bolded the part of Sundar’s answer that really grabbed me. He was not differentiating between an established news organization/institution, like Nilay and The Verge newsroom, from individual creators. As a journalist and media executive my ears are pretty well tuned to hear that lack of distinction. He said it more clearly at the end of his answer to that same question: “I think people are producing a lot of content, and I see consumers consuming a lot of content.”
And it reminded me of a well-traveled statement from another CEO of a technology platform company ….
Elon’s remark was offered in a specific context. He was broadcasting confidence in support of an insurgent anti-establishment campaign in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election. The statement is inherently political and clearly intended to provoke.
Sundar was sitting down for an interview with a well-established journalist. He was no-doubt prepped for a thorough and thoughtful conversation and probably NOT looking to provoke.
Yet these two statements lead to similar destinations: more information, from more sources. In Elon’s statement, there is now nothing stopping information from getting to you or you getting information out. In Sundar’s you’ll have an abundance of varied information that you can refine.
In both statements — it is clear that platforms are seeking to empower/serve those using them with more information, faster. What remains unsaid is what (if any?) guardrails and mechanisms will be available to ensure that high-quality information is being created and made available to be found.
So What Should I Do?
It’s probably time to be a little more intentional about how you interact with the internet. The goods news: you’re certainly already doing this to some degree!
From the moment you started using search engines, you began typing words into a search box to return a list of ‘little blue links’ to sort through. If the links/videos/photos weren’t right, you just tried another mix of words.
Hopefully, along the way, you’ve learned to value certain websites and sources over others.
Maybe you learned how to use certain Boolean search operators or conduct vertical searches within Google.
In the past few years, there has been evidence and reporting of (mostly younger) people using TikTok and Instagram instead of Google to discover for things like vacations, clothing or restaurants. There’s also evidence of others appending “reddit” to the end of their google search because of perceived decay in the value of Google results.
These are all examples of how we can manipulate platforms to get the information we need. And all of that manipulation is incredibly human. We are adapting the tools to match our actual behaviors and we are seeking out authentic human sources/voices we trust for one reason or another.
Another example as we go through this transitory moment: My friend and collaborator Ryan Kellett is publicly documenting which information sources he’s paying for and paying attention to on LinkedIn. Those are sources he might use to inform his AI tooling … or to bypass it.
Frankly, no one can be sure how that might manifest as these platform companies keep unveiling new AI-powered discovery tools at a dizzying pace. But that ethos is what any individual can hold onto as a guidepost as we step forward into this world — whether you find yourself building a custom LLM to query or just trying to avoid the AI-integration enough to get Google to work the way it used to.
As Sundar admitted, quite candidly, in the interview: “At the end of the day, we are reflecting what users want. If you do the wrong thing, users won’t use our product and go somewhere else.