The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]:
"As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..."
That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more.
I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied. Not always of course, but often enough that I have noticed it.
What a generous euphemism. Depending on the topic, it's not unusual to see Google AI search referencing links that indicate the exact opposite of what it presents in its prose.
So many of these tools are presented as if they're doing something you'd intuitively expect of a human operator, like collating search results and then summarizing them in this case, but the actual operation of them is so alien to us that our intuitions don't apply and these presentations are all but fraudulent.
Because it's presentation cites references, and because those references sometimes reinforce the expression of the AI prose, we grant it trust, but it doesn't use those references in the way a human would and so the relevance of them being cited is radically different (and weaker) than we're accustomed to.
The closest example in human behavior might be the rushed, naive student who just pastes citations into an already written paper at the last minute, but even that's an anthropomorphism that misrepresents the alien ways in which the tool works.
I don't think that means anything. It's just some random words to add pretense to an arbitrary change.
I mean, just stop to think about it. You have a Youtube account, you post videos. Analytics shows traffic from Google but can't show you the keywords.
At one point, Google merged Youtube with Google+. Just did it outright without asking anybody.
Youtubers link their Youtube accounts with Google AdSense.
You can link your Youtube account with your Google Ads account if you want to advertise.
One of the latest features added to the Search Console was... an AI chatbot.
So Google showed us they can link anything with Youtube when it wants, and they can add new features to GSC if it's AI, but for some reason showing Google search terms for Youtube channels took 20 years.
I wish I knew a word like enshittification but for when something improves but at a rate so slow you don't even feel like celebrating it anymore. I think I'd use such word a lot...
It may just be me, but I find googles search console surprisingly inaccurate or at least hard to parse. Even the data within it is often conflicting and I'm not sure why the results show as they do. Things like it will show a click through rate for specific pages but have no correlation to the search terms that drove that click, yet show impressions for the page far beyond what it shows for terms. Can't imagine it will be better for something as hard to track as creator tracking cross-platform.
I noticed yesterday that they've managed to make editing the text field on their search page lag and flip/reorder characters entered during the edit: editing “foot pedal” into “foot pedal keyboard” became “foot pedal oardkeyb”
I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.
Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.
They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.
If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.
It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.
"As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..."
That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more.
I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied. Not always of course, but often enough that I have noticed it.
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-con...
What a generous euphemism. Depending on the topic, it's not unusual to see Google AI search referencing links that indicate the exact opposite of what it presents in its prose.
So many of these tools are presented as if they're doing something you'd intuitively expect of a human operator, like collating search results and then summarizing them in this case, but the actual operation of them is so alien to us that our intuitions don't apply and these presentations are all but fraudulent.
Because it's presentation cites references, and because those references sometimes reinforce the expression of the AI prose, we grant it trust, but it doesn't use those references in the way a human would and so the relevance of them being cited is radically different (and weaker) than we're accustomed to.
The closest example in human behavior might be the rushed, naive student who just pastes citations into an already written paper at the last minute, but even that's an anthropomorphism that misrepresents the alien ways in which the tool works.
I mean, just stop to think about it. You have a Youtube account, you post videos. Analytics shows traffic from Google but can't show you the keywords.
At one point, Google merged Youtube with Google+. Just did it outright without asking anybody.
Youtubers link their Youtube accounts with Google AdSense.
You can link your Youtube account with your Google Ads account if you want to advertise.
One of the latest features added to the Search Console was... an AI chatbot.
So Google showed us they can link anything with Youtube when it wants, and they can add new features to GSC if it's AI, but for some reason showing Google search terms for Youtube channels took 20 years.
I wish I knew a word like enshittification but for when something improves but at a rate so slow you don't even feel like celebrating it anymore. I think I'd use such word a lot...
Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms
Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.
So, artisans, metalworkers, engineers?