The change could have enormous consequences for how people find information online, and for the websites that rely on Google to send them traffic. Publishers have already reported declines due to Google’s AI Overviews, which often answer users’ questions directly without requiring them to click through to another site. If AI Mode becomes the default, those effects may only grow.
I think the sad thing about all of this is the lead that was mentioned yesterday. People will trust AI to spit out whatever the most probable answer is, which makes every answer homogeneous. Few people will actually dive into the open web sites that provide the answer they are searching for, making groupthink worse than it already is. The grey middleground will be sacrificed for perpetual profit.