Google's parent company Alphabet announced on Thursday the expansion of its AI-generated summaries for search queries to six new countries.
As per Reuters, these countries include, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and Britain.
This feature, known as AI Overviews, displays a summary at the top of search results before traditional web links.
Initially launched to all US users in May after a year-long trial, AI Overviews faced criticism due to factually incorrect answers, including a pizza recipe that listed glue as an ingredient and a misstatement about former US President Barack Obama’s religion.
Google acknowledged these issues and updated the feature to limit which queries would display AI answers and restrict user-generated content from websites like Reddit.
In addition to this, Google is adding more hyperlinks to the feature, displaying websites alongside AI-generated answers and testing links within the summary text to drive traffic to relevant websites.
This update aims to balance the needs of Google, users, and publishers amid concerns from the media industry about potential losses in referral traffic due to the AI feature.
