Google Discover Reportedly Showing AI Summaries of News Articles to Some Users

Google Discover, the personalised news and blog feed within the Google app on smartphones, is reportedly getting a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature. As per the report, the feed is replacing news headlines and direct links to news articles with an AI-generated summary, similar to the AI Overviews feature on Search. The feature is said to also remove the mention of a single publication, and instead show multiple websites as citations. Separately, the Mountain View-based tech giant is reportedly also experimenting with a bullet-point-style summary format, which is not powered by AI.

Google Discover Reportedly Brings AI Summaries to the Concerns of News Publishers

According to a TechCrunch report, some users have spotted a new feature in Google Discover. Instead of seeing news headlines and the lead images, they are reportedly seeing an AI Overviews-style summary of the news. The new format is also said to remove the mention of the publisher or a direct link to the article, and instead just shows multiple logos of publishers (who have covered the news) as citations.

AI summaries in Google Discover feed
Photo Credit: TechCrunch

The publication reached out to the company, and a spokesperson reportedly said that this is not a test, but instead a new feature currently available only in the US. TechCrunch highlighted that AI summaries are visible on both Android and iOS devices in the US.

Google's new AI feature comes at a time when news publishers are struggling to get traffic on their websites and pages due to the rise of AI chatbots and Google's AI products, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Since generative AI tools take information from publicly available web pages and provide answers to queries in a conversational manner, it has started eating into the search traffic globally.

According to The Economist, worldwide search traffic dropped by 15 percent year-over-year (YoY) in June, whereas the rate of no click-throughs to news websites and articles has grown from 56 percent in May 2024 (when AI Overviews was launched) to nearly 69 percent in May this year. Additionally, the report claims that global organic traffic to these websites also fell from more than 2.3 billion in H1 2024 to less than 1.7 billion in the ongoing year.

Notably, the US-based non-profit trade association, News/Media Alliance, issued a statement to Google's AI Mode in May and called it “the definition of theft.” The allegation was made as AI Mode shows a comprehensive answer to user queries without the list of URLs present in traditional Search results.

Despite the concerns, Google has not resolved the concerns of news publishers. Currently, the tech giant does not provide any standalone method to prevent their content from being collected by Googlebot, which also feeds the data to its AI products, as per the company's documentation. The only way is to prevent Googlebot from crawling the data, which would also lead to removal from all forms of search results, including web search, Google Images, and Discover.