AI Overviews. Well, what now?
Food for thought.
There’s this quote from Larry Page, back in 2000:
Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.
25 years later and it’s called AI Overviews.
But something fundamental happened along the way: search changed. Larry Page imagined AI improving search, but didn’t fully anticipate the shift in how people interact with information. People don’t search anymore. They're asking. Actually, they’re delegating.
Asking is the new interface, and the expectation is delegation.
Ask yourself: are you designing experiences for people who ask?
Real-world example: someone asks ChatGPT or AI Overview: "I need to print photos and pick them up today: what’s the best option?"
Picta might get mentioned. But if the AI does its job well, the user might never visit picta.com.
So the question is: how do you create a brand that lives in this new layer of abstraction, when people rely on AI to know you without ever seeing you?
AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity. These are not upgrades to search. They're the first drafts of a new Operating System. We're moving from:
Search engine → Answer engine (you're here) → Context-aware systems that curate and act on your behalf.
Generative AI gives you direct answers. In the upcoming future, it will give you guidance based on your context. The more you talk with them, the more they understand your intent. These platforms will evolve from answer engines into personal curators of the web. You won’t need to click through a dozen links anymore. You'll just ask and go straight from intent to action.
In all this battle, Google has something LLMs don’t have (yet?). Emails. Browser. And that’s a powerful asset when you need context to provide users with the best curation ever.
Thought?