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The next time you’re browsing the Google app for a news story, you might not have to leave the search to find the information you’re looking for.
First spotted by 9to5Google, Google is testing AI-created news summaries on its Discover feed. The feature isn’t available to everyone yet, but it’s showing up on both Android and iOS.
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Under the old way, your Discover feed surfaces links to articles Google thinks you’d be interested in. The setup is pretty straightforward, with the article source clearly displayed and a link to read beyond the headline.
The new way aims to keep you within the Google app by showing an AI-powered summary of a story pulled together from multiple sources. While those sources do get a small icon above the article, not all sources are shown immediately — some are relegated to a “+1” or “+2” that you have to tap to see. Even though the summaries come from multiple sources, only a single source gets an actual link to click through. In the few examples I saw of the feature in action, it wasn’t clear how Google chose that source.
“This AI-powered feature will show a brief preview of some trending lifestyle topics, like entertainment or sports, to help people connect with web content and stay up to date,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.
Screenshot by Jason Hiner/ZDNET
This feature comes not long after the debut of Perplexity Discover, a similar feature that lets you read summaries of trending news articles. Like Google’s feature, Perplexity’s draws from multiple sources (actual curators gather the links). While Perplexity’s version did seem to summarize the news a little better, it makes seeing the sources even more difficult, and actually prioritizes a link to the curator over a link to the source.
Perplexity also seemed to use significantly more sources, often citing more than 20 links. Most summaries in Google Discovery come from around five sources (a few even use a single source).
While I’m usually not opposed to features that let us take in information more efficiently, it’s tough as a writer to get behind something that bypasses actually reading someone’s work — especially if it minimizes where the information came from in the first place. Most major news sites saw a noticeable decline in traffic when Google introduced AI overviews to Search, some as much as 40%, so you have to wonder if further AI integration will funnel away readers even more. According to analysis from the New York Post, of the top 50 news domains, 37 saw a decline in year-over-year traffic after the launch AI Overview.
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In addition to traffic concerns, Google’s AI overviews in Search aren’t always reliable, so there’s concern about whether its news summaries will fare better. As Google continues to plug AI into every conceivable spot though, we’ll probably continue to see more features like this.
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