AI reviews are added to Google Discover — even less traffic for news sites

Google is preparing to introduce AI reviews not only in web search but also in Discover news feed. This is likely to reduce traffic to news sites like ITC.ua.

As noted by 9to5Google, the Discover feed has received some updates that indicate testing. Instead of the logo and title of just one publication, you can now see a series of overlapping icons in the upper left corner of some cards — sources used for AI summarization. If you click on the icons, a «More» panel appears with a full list of the publications used. The new option is a test version and is available on both Android and iOS, in the Google app.

Back in early June, the analytical platform DiscoverSnoop noticed that Google was testing generated summaries in the Discover feed, but only for video content at the time. In these early tests, some videos had a short text written by artificial intelligence right above the thumbnail. Users could quickly view three lines, and if they were curious, they could click «More» to see the rest of the 10 or so lines.

Users now see a three-line snippet of the news content before clicking «See more» and getting a larger description. There is a small but important reminder at the bottom: «Generated by artificial intelligence, which can make mistakes». The preview image is taken from the first news item in the story, and the headline is immediately below it.

Given the traffic on web pages, this seems to give the user more information before going to the story. However, this may simply prevent the transition from happening — the reader will have enough information from the AI summary. Currently, these summaries are displayed alongside the traditional format of links to individual news stories.

As with AI reviews, there is also an ethical issue: the tool takes content from the authors’ materials and turns them into its own text. Even Google itself mentions the potential for errors in such reports in its post above. At one time Apple has had a negative experience with frankly false reports from AI Intelligence, Google’s tool is also not always accurate.