Discover isn’t the only place Google is experimenting with AI-generated snippets

On Friday, The Verge’s Sean Hollister reported that Google is now calling AI-generated headlines in Discover a “feature,” not just an experiment.

For several months now, Google has been rewriting headlines and snippets of news articles in Discover’s personalized content feed using AI,  instead of displaying the ones supplied by publishers.

In December, Google told The Verge this was “a small UI experiment for a subset of Discover users.” Now Google has reframed the update as a “feature” that “performs well for user satisfaction.”

In other words, AI headlines are likely here to stay. That’s despite the feature performing poorly for accuracy. AI-generated headlines in Discover sometimes state the opposite of what the news articles report and summaries routinely misrepresent information within those stories. There are currently no clear disclosures when AI is used to generate copy in the Discover feed.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson clarified to The Verge that what it is calling an “overview headline” actually “reflects information across a range of sites, and is not a rewrite of individual article headlines.”

The rollout of AI headlines in Discover follows a familiar pattern for the search giant, in which it trials AI integration in search as “an experiment,” minimizes the update after backlash over accuracy problems, then expands and cements the update. (See: the AI Overviews “eat rocks” debacle.)

With this pattern in mind, it’s worth noting that Discover isn’t the only place Google is experimenting with AI-generated snippets in search. Last summer, Google’s Search Labs launched Web Guide, a feature that “uses AI to intelligently organize the search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.”

The experiment hasn’t gotten much attention so far, despite demonstrating fundamental changes to how links might appear in search. For example, Web Guide groups links together by subcategory rather than listing them out one by one. When I searched “is search traffic to news publishers from Google declining,” Web Guide split links up into several topic buckets, each with its own AI-generated headline and subhead.

One, called “Current decline in Google Search Traffic” included links to Search Engine Roundtable and PC Mag. Another, called “Impact of AI Overviews on Search Traffic” included news reports from NPR, Digiday, and the BBC. “Google Search vs. Discover Traffic Trends” linked to the r/SEO subreddit. Each bucket included a “show more” tab to expand the number of relevant links.

Under each headline was an AI subhead that appeared to synthesize information and data from several different sources. “Global referrals from Google Search to publishers dropped 33% (38% in the US) in one year. Google Discover referrals also decreased 21%,” read one subhead.

While Web Guide retains the original headlines from publishers, the snippets are entirely written and reframed. Instead of a traditional snippet, there’s an AI-generated meta-explanation of how the source will answer the query. These explanations often start with action verbs like “confirms,” “clarifies,” “reports,” or “details.” In the process, they flatten the voice of individual publishers, reducing all the link descriptions to the same sterile tone.

One BBC article, for example, includes this summary: “Addresses concerns about declining click-through rates to news publishers due to AI Overviews, with one publisher reporting an 89% fall, despite Google’s claims of stable click volumes.”

Sometimes these explanations even spotlight the shortcomings of a given source. The link to the r/SEO subreddit is hedged because “it’s a Reddit discussion summarizing external data.” Another link is flagged for being “an isolated case.” Other test searches of Web Guide turned up other qualifying phrases like “not officially verified” and “based on a deleted post.”

Unlike other summarization features — say, AI Overviews — Web Guide comes close to delivering judgment on how useful individual sources might be, rather than simply extracting information from those sources.

“Under the hood, Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web,” wrote Austin Wu, a Google product manager in a blogpost about the experiment last summer. “Similar to AI Mode, Web Guide uses a query fan-out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.”

For now, Web Guide is entirely opt-in and can be enabled or disabled from the Search Labs landing page. (You can give it a try yourself here). In December, though, Google announced it was expanding the trial and showing it in more search results under the “All” tab.

Similar to Discover headlines, Web Guide is another example of Google using generative AI to mediate search and chip away at the little real estate news publishers still have to present themselves directly to users.