Google makes AI Overviews the default answer in Search

At Google I/O, the Search team made AI Overviews the default answer surface for English users, demoting blue links to a fallback. Critics call it a "war on the open web," since Google synthesizes answers from crawled content without sending traffic back to publishers.

• AI Overviews became the default answer for English users
• AI Overviews are wrong about 10% of the time
• Sources appear as tiny chips the median user does not click
• Google controls the browser, mobile OS, video and ad-tech layers