Is Google's slow AI immersion just boiling the publishing frog?

Google keeps integrating AI into everything and anything, striving to stay afloat and keep users within its boundaries. Although it seems bleak, not all is lost.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:03, 22 May 2025

If a righteous publisher were sat in the audience at this week's Google I/O, it is quite possible that those around them might fear for their respiratory health. Such were the opportunities to signal dissent by coughing "B***S***" at the various pronouncements, you might have seen face masks being donned in the vicinity.

The long story short is that Google is going to put AI everywhere, in everything, in increments, until the user base finds itself floating on a tide of it, without realising they were going in the water, water with a colourful G stamped on every molecule.

The situation for our industry can be perfectly framed by resorting to our old, purposefully cryptic and misleading friend, Google's documentation. In the masterful work that is "Succeeding In AI Search", presumably written by someone with a doctorate in Comparative Ambiguity, we find the following sentence: "We've seen that when people click to a website from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality, where users are more likely to spend more time on the site."

"Seen" - you can build a publishing business on "seen" can't you? SEO consultant Joe Youngblood summed up many of our feelings when he responded to Google's post on X linking to "Succeeding In AI Search", by simply asking "So why not give us this data so we can validate it? A simple UTM parameter would do the trick." It would, but it would reveal a horrible truth too. Once again, we're in a situation where the Tech Giant narrative does not match the publishing reality. 

We would be fools to believe that, outside of a few publishers who can give Mountain View trouble on a political level due to their proximity to the ears of legislators, we are, as a mass, irrelevant to their broader strategy. That's a shame for them, as that same mass of publishers are the worker bees of content. At this rate, all they'll have left is synthetic honey. 

Make no mistake, their intent is to keep more and more users within their proprietary boundaries. The user journey is now more of a user roundabout.

As Liz Reid, Google's Head of Search, put it in an interview with The Verge this week: "I think the search results page was a construct. The way we’ve all Googled for two decades was largely a response to the structure of the web itself: web pages in, web pages out. Good AI models are now able to get around that structure, and find and synthesize information from lots of sources. Now the question for Google, Reid says, is "is the information just presented to you, or is it presented to you in a way that feels as useful as you would like it to be?'"

Useful. Such a benign word. Such malign intent. As a wiser head than me pointed out, by "construct", Reid means "relic". Maybe Reid has a magic source farm, where quality content grows for free? If you're publishing unsourced content, that is to all intents and purposes your own, then surely you are a publisher?

Actual publishers aren't high on the priority list for people such as Reid who seem to regard anything that Google does not control as broken. Only, in this case, Google does control the web, so, who’s to blame here?

It's to OpenAI that the gaze of Google's senior people is largely directed, if only because their share options are probably juicier quicker. If that is understood as their lodestar, then everything else they are doing falls into place. 

Jony be bad for business
You can guarantee they're in a panic this week after OpenAI recruited legendary Apple designer Jony Ive for a $6 billion signing-on fee, disguised as purchasing his business. Given that Ive has been brought in to work on as-yet undisclosed hardware products, the corridors at Mountain View will no doubt be abuzz with gossip, more share option comparisons, and searching questions of what their opinions should be in public. None of that gossip is about content, except in the abstract. Google is still chasing OpenAI like an elephant chasing a wasp. But, it is still the elephant.

Coupled to the fact that ChatGPT still seems to be outperforming Gemini in the actual user marketplace - in terms of feedback if not raw numbers - and you can understand their tunnel vision. That, and the looming prospect that their entire business might yet get spatchcocked and filleted by the courts in the near future. 

If they see AI as their commercial life raft, then it's notable that following the I/O presentations this week the company's share price actually dipped. Is that even good or bad any more? It's hard to tell. For the rest of us, a panicked Google is like living under a precarious mountain crag with reports of earthquakes in the distance.  

Amid all this, there are few bright spots for publishers, beyond the creeping feeling that we need a new internet shop window. We may have one, or at least, larger publishers may have one. Google Discover for desktop is rolling out, meaning that users utilising that search tab will start to see actual stories from actual publishers displayed, to click on if they so wish. It's a fresh opportunity to wow them and get them into your ecosystem rather than Google's, so make the best of it.

That such thin traffic gruel must be treated as a banquet is telling in itself, but it's something. At least they'll have some data on whether people prefer sourced content to a plausible AI mishmash.