Google’s AI Shift Is Causing a Collective Freak-Out: Parmy Olson (1)

When Google recently announced radical changes to its search tool that will overshadow the page of blue links we’ve been used to seeing for more than a decade, online advertisers had something of a collective freak-out. The Alphabet Inc.-owned company called it the biggest such shift in more than 25 years, and that the search bar would be “completely reimagined” with artificial intelligence.

Forget sponsored links. Now “conversational discovery ads” will be built to sit inside AI answers themselves, and potentially include a chat agent so the user never clicks through to a website. On the day of the announcement, an online-advertising ...