Google’s AI summaries that appear above search results, leading—to no one’s surprise—to a massive drop in search clicks. Then there’s Google’s version of Perplexity, called AI Mode.
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For 20 years, Google blocked other sites from embedding Google.com. Today it announced it will embed every publisher’s site into its own AI pages, ignoring the exact browser protections it helped build. (Thomas Baekdal, LinkedIn)
“AI responses may include mistakes,” Google says at the bottom of its AI Overviews. How many? According to a startup, 1 out of 10 summaries is problematic. That’s “millions of erroneous answers every hour.” (The New York Times)
What’s it with the savior narrative? Sebastian Mallaby's biography of Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) asks if one decent man can steer AI development. It’s good on the philosophy and the personalities, less good on the hard questions. At times the awestruck tone is difficult to swallow. (Gideon Lichfield, The Economist)
Google is rewriting news headlines in search results. “Copilot Changes: Marketing Teams at it Again.” That’s not a headline a journalist wrote. Google did. Without telling anyone. (Sean Hollister, The Verge)
Google says no: “We really don’t want you to think you need to be doing that or produce two versions of your content, one for the LLM and one for the net.” (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land)
How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent. (Varsha Bansal, The Guardian)
Less than nine seconds of watching TV: That’s the energy consumption Google reports for the “median Gemini Apps text prompt” in May 2025, which includes “all LLM models serving the Gemini app, including all supporting models for scoring, ranking, classification, and other prompt routing tasks” and accounts for idle machines and overhead.
“There’s no getting around the decline in traffic”: Another apocalyptic roundup on what’s happening with search. (Klaudia Jaźwińska, Columbia Journalism Review)
AI Mode has over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and India, says Google. (Abner Li, 9to5Google)
Rename screenshots with a description automatically with Gemini–for free
Screenshots. I take lots of them. I need something I see in my browser for a presentation. I want to remember something I see on social media on my phone. So. Many. Screenshots. And then what? Google has launched a tool to access Gemini 2.5 Pro from the command line. It’s called Gemini-CLI, and it...
Google got The Economist and The Atlantic to provide content for NotebookLM (Sarah Perez, TechCrunch)
Google AI Mode Live In US: Tests Deep Search, Live Search, Personalization, Custom Charts, Shopping & Agentic. And no, Search Console data will not include breakdowns for AI Mode and AI Overviews. (Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable)
Google’s AI Mode could deal a devastating blow to the web’s business model. (Thomas Germain, BBC)
Google tests NotebookLM’s chatty AI podcast on Search.
Google is turning search results into podcasts
One click, and you’ve got two AI voices having what sounds like the world's most scripted coffee shop conversation about whatever you just Googled. It’s called Audio Overviews and works like the feature in NotebookLM, powered by Gemini's text-to-speech. As usual, it’s only live in Search Labs in the US for now. And weirdly, it's...
