The AI search wave is real. Can media survive it?

People like to say that change happens gradually, then all at once. That pattern seems to be holding with respect to AI in search, and we may be at the beginning of the “all at once” part now that Google has officially launched AI Mode, which turns internet searches into conversations where you get answers instead of links.

The point of AI Mode is for Google to act as an assistant to help you accomplish what you were trying to do with the search in the first place. Need to book a flight, find a sushi restaurant nearby, or grab a statistic that supports the email pitch you’re authoring? AI Mode will simply find what you need and even complete the action for you in many cases. And those cases will continue to expand: The company showed a future shopping capability where Google completes checkout for you without ever needing to leave the search page.

Potential for Disruption

The potential disruption to industries is staggering, not just for the media but also for marketing, e-commerce—the whole web, really. For now, however, it remains mostly potential. AI Mode primarily lives as a button on the Google homepage and one of the tabs on results pages (alongside tabs for News, Photos, Videos, etc.). Users need to deliberately engage with it. And the omnibox in Chrome, where most Google searches occur, still defaults to regular search.

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So despite the hype and panic emanating from Google’s I/O conference over AI Mode, Google isn’t going all-in just yet, and with good reason: Its existing business model depends greatly on the search results page. AI Mode can display ads, too, but it’s going to take time for the product to mature as a business. There’s also the simple fact that it costs Google more to serve up an AI answer versus a search page—it needs to move slowly in order to keep from tanking its own profits.

The undeniable rise of AI search

Make no mistake, though: The AI Mode summary will be the new battleground for attention. It’s fundamentally more engaging than even Google’s AI Overviews that appear at the top of search results pages. Whereas Overviews are a kind of “extra” to the list of links, AI Mode effectively creates a bubble around your Google experience, one that you deliberately enter and stay within. It’s designed to “fan out” from your initial query, turning search into something that’s more like a collaboration with Google on a task that search is just one part of.

While that may sound like work compared to just getting served a search query, you have to remember: Once you had those results, you had to do the work—the navigating to sites, judging which were credible, and then manually absorbing information, filtering the irrelevant stuff.

Now AI Mode does most of that work for you, greatly reducing the friction or “cognitive load” involved in getting information. I see this all the time in my own experience: Over the Memorial Day weekend, I ended up looping in AI assistants for several different projects—hanging outdoor lights, what those metal ring-thingies are called, and how to optimize my cooking methods for pork ribs versus beef ribs. In all those interactions, no list of links was required, and in many cases, I got the information verbally, reducing friction even more.

I’m a sample size of one, but studies suggest I’m far from alone. A recent study revealed 17%, or one in five consumers, now rely on AI answers more than traditional search. Referrals from generative AI to websites surged over 1,200% between July 2024 and February of this year, according to Adobe research. The AI search wave is real.

When knowledge goes flat

AI search experiences are more convenient, but it comes at a cost. If the AI summary is the new place for information brokers to conquer, there’s less land to fight over. Summaries simply can’t meaningfully cite dozens of sources in a curt answer. Moreover, if one or two sources change, the effect on the summary will be minimal. If an AI answer gets a new site fueling it, it’s still an averaged, homogenized consensus built from several sources. You don’t have the unusual link suddenly gaining prominence on a results page, inviting users to go down a rabbit hole. An AI summary is made to pave over those holes.

This tendency toward singular, concise answers may have the inadvertent effect of flattening knowledge diversity. Mainstream perspectives will get prioritized, and niche or contrarian voices will have a tougher time standing out.

Signal generators

This shift puts a burden on journalists and media organizations to act not just as content creators but also as distinctive signal generators in a noisy, compressed ecosystem. In a world where AI systems synthesize information from thousands of sources, what gets retained are the most statistically common patterns—not necessarily the most insightful or original voices.

That’s why it’s going to be essential for media sites to be able to do both: structure content to acknowledge and align with the mainstream view, but also provide original and unique perspectives that will offer real value for those who go deeper. It’s an updated version of a diverse content strategy, only in the AI world it can mean serving those ingredients in new ways: possibly by remixing content into formats recognizable by a multimodal AI that cares just as much about sound and video as it does about text.

One thing’s for sure: AI answers are here to stay, and “winning” them is going to be the game to master. What’s unclear is what will be harder: influencing readers through what the summary says, or getting them to click through the AI Mode bubble so you can influence them yourself. Let the games begin.

Subscribe to Media CoPilot. Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com