Google has rolled out a retooled search engine that will frequently favor responses crafted by artificial intelligence over website links, a shift promising to quicken the quest for information while also potentially disrupting the flow of money-making internet traffic. The makeover, announced at Google's annual developers conference, will begin this week in the U.S. when hundreds of millions of people will start to periodically see conversational summaries generated by the company's AI technology at the top of the search engine's results page. The AI overviews are supposed to only crop up when Google's technology determines they will be the quickest and most effective way to satisfy a user's curiosity — a solution mostly likely to happen with complex subjects or when people are brainstorming, or planning. People will likely still see Google's traditional website links and ads for simple searches for things like a store recommendation or weather forecasts. Google began testing AI overviews with a small subset of selected users a year ago, but the company is now making it one of the staples in its search results in the U.S. before introducing the feature in other parts of the world. By the end of the year, Google expects the recurring AI overviews to be part of its search results for about 1 billion people. "People are using it to search an entirely new ways and asking new types of questions, longer and more complex queries, even searching with photos and getting back the best the web has to offer. We have been testing this experience outside of labs and we are encouraged to see not only an increase in search usage, but also an increase in user satisfaction," says Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "I'm excited to announce that we will begin launching this fully revamped experience, AI Overviews, to everyone in the US this week and will bring it to more countries soon." The increasing use of AI technology to summarize information in chatbots such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT during the past 18 months already has been raising legal questions about whether the companies behind the services are illegally pulling from copyrighted material to advance their services. It's an allegation at the heart of a high-profile lawsuit that The New York Times filed late last year against OpenAI and its biggest backer, Microsoft. Google's AI overviews could provoke lawsuits too, especially if they siphon away traffic and ad sales from websites that believe the company is unfairly profiting from their content. "It's clear that is already helping people, from their everyday tasks to their most ambitious, productive and imaginative endeavors. Our AI innovations like multi modality, long contexts, and agents are on the cutting edge of what this technology can do, Take it to a whole new level its capacity to help people. Yet, as with any emerging technology, there are still risks and new questions that will arise as AI advances and its uses evolve. In navigating these complexities, we're guided by AI principles, and we're learning from our users, partners and our own research. To us, building AI responsibly means both addressing the risks and maximizing the benefits for people and society," says James Manyika, Senior Vice President in charge of Research, Technology & Society at Google. The injection of more AI into Google's search engine marks one of the most dramatic changes that the company has made in its foundation since its inception in the late 1990s. It's a move that opens the door for more growth and innovation but also threatens to trigger a sea change in web surfing habits. "All of this shows the important progress we have made as we take a bold and responsible approach to making AI helpful for everyone," says Pichai. Well aware of how much attention is centered on the technology, Pichai ended a nearly two-hour succession of presentations by asking Google's Gemini model how many times AI had been mentioned. The count: 120, and then the tally edged up by one more when Pichai said, “AI,” yet again. Google stands to suffer if the AI overviews undercuts ads tied to its search engine — a business that reeled in $175 billion in revenue last year alone. And website publishers — ranging from major media outlets to entrepreneurs and startups that focus on more narrow subjects — will be hurt if the AI overviews are so informative that they result in fewer clicks on the website links that will still appear lower on the results page.