Today, I\u2019m talking to Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who joined the show the day after the Google I\/O developer conference last week. Google\u2019s focus during the conference was AI, of course \u2014 Google is building AI into virtually all of its products. My personal favorite is the new AI search in Google Photos that lets you ask things like, \u201cWhat\u2019s my license plate number?\u201d and get an answer back from your entire photo library. All in all, Google executives said \u201cAI\u201d more than 120 times during the keynote \u2014 we counted<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But there was one particular announcement at I\/O that\u2019s sending shockwaves around the web: Google is rolling out what it calls AI Overviews in Search<\/a> to everyone in the United States by this week and around the world to more than a billion users by the end of the year. That means when you search for something on Google, you\u2019ll get AI-powered results at the top of the page for a number of queries. The company literally describes this as \u201cletting Google do the Googling for you.\u201d Google has been testing this for a year now, in what it called the Search Generative Experience<\/a>, so you may have already seen a version of this \u2014 but now it\u2019s here, and it will change the web as we know it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Listen to Decoder<\/em>, a show hosted by The Verge<\/em>\u2019s Nilay Patel about big ideas \u2014 and other problems.\u00a0Subscribe\u00a0here<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Until now, Google\u2019s ecosystem has been based on links to everyone else\u2019s<\/em> content: you type something into a search box, you see some links, and you click one. That sends traffic to websites, which their owners can try to monetize in various ways, and ideally everyone wins. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Google is by far the biggest source of traffic on the web today, so if it starts keeping that traffic for itself by answering questions with AI, that will change or potentially even destroy the internet ecosystem as we know it. The News\/Media Alliance, which represents a bunch of fancy news publishers, put out a press release<\/a> calling AI previews in search \u201ccatastrophic to our traffic.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you\u2019re a Decoder<\/em> listener, you\u2019ve heard me talk about this idea a lot over the past year: I call it Google Zero, and I\u2019ve been asking web<\/a> and media CEOs<\/a> what would happen to their businesses<\/a> if their Google traffic were to go to zero<\/a>. If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what\u2019s the incentive to put new content on the web? What\u2019s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the web with AI, what are all these bots going to summarize when people ask them questions?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sundar has some ideas. For one, he\u2019s not convinced the web, which he says he cares deeply about, is in all that much danger. You\u2019ll hear him mention Wired<\/em>\u2019s famous 2010 headline<\/a>, \u201cThe web Is dead,\u201d and he makes the argument that new, transformative technologies like AI always cause some short-term disruptions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He says injecting AI into Search is about creating value for users, and those users are telling him that they find these new features to be helpful \u2014 and even clicking on links at higher rates in the AI previews. But he didn\u2019t say where that leaves the people who put the content on the internet in the first place. We really sat with that idea for a while \u2014 and we talked a lot about the anger creative people feel toward AI systems training on their work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ve talked to Sundar<\/a> quite a bit<\/a> over the past few years, and this was the most fired up I\u2019ve ever seen him. You can really tell that there is a deep tension between the vision Google has for the future \u2014 where AI magically makes us smarter, more productive, and more artistic \u2014 and the very real fears and anxieties creators and website owners are feeling right now<\/em> about how search has changed and how AI might swallow the internet forever. Sundar is wrestling with that tension.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One note: you\u2019ll hear me say I think Sundar keeps making oblique references to OpenAI, which he pushes back on pretty strongly. I thought about it afterward, and it\u2019s pretty clear he wasn\u2019t just talking about OpenAI but also Meta, which has openly turned away from sending any traffic<\/a> to any websites whatsoever and has been explicit<\/a> that it doesn\u2019t want to support news<\/a> on its platforms at all anymore. I wish that had clicked for me during this conversation, because I would have asked about it more directly.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay, Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sundar Pichai, you are the CEO of both Alphabet and Google. Welcome to Decoder<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I am excited to talk to you. I feel like I talk to you every year at Google I\/O, and we talk about all the <\/strong>things you\u2019ve announced<\/strong><\/a>. There\u2019s a lot of AI news to talk about. As you know, I\u2019m particularly interested in the future of the web, so I really want to talk about that with you, but I figured I\u2019d start with an easy one. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you think language is the same as intelligence?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Wow, that\u2019s not an easy question! I don\u2019t think I\u2019m the expert on it. I think language does encode a lot of intelligence, probably more than people thought. It explains the successes of large language models to a great extent. But my intuition tells me, as humans, there\u2019s a lot more to the way we consume information than language alone. But I\u2019d say language is a lot more than people think it is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The reason I asked that question to start is: I look at the announcements at I\/O with AI and what you\u2019re doing, I look at your competitors with AI and what they\u2019re doing, and everything is very language-heavy. It\u2019s LLMs that have really led to this explosion of interest in innovation and investment, and I wonder if the intelligence is increasing at the same rate as the facility with language. I kind of don\u2019t see it, to be perfectly honest. I see computers getting much better at language and actually in some cases getting dumber. I\u2019m wondering if you see that same gap.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, it\u2019s a great question. Part of the reason we made Gemini natively multimodal \u2014 and you\u2019re beginning to see glimpses of it now but it hasn\u2019t made its way fully into products yet \u2014 is so that with audio, video, text, images, and code, when we have multimodality working on the input and output side \u2014 and we are training models using all of that \u2014 maybe in the next cycle, that\u2019ll encapsulate a lot more than just today, which is primarily text-based. I think that continuum will shift as we take in a lot more information that way. So maybe there\u2019s more to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last year the tagline was \u201cBold but responsible.\u201d That\u2019s Google\u2019s approach. You said it again onstage this year. And then I look at <\/strong>our reactions to AI getting things wrong<\/strong><\/a>, and it seems like they\u2019re getting more and more tempered over time. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ll give you an example. In the demos you had yesterday, you showed multimodal video search of someone trying to fix a broken film camera. And <\/strong>the answer was just wrong<\/strong><\/a>. The answer that was highlighted in the video was, \u201cJust open the back of the film camera and jiggle it.\u201d It\u2019s like, well, that would ruin all of your film. No one who had an intelligent understanding of how that camera [worked] would suggest that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was talking to the team and, ironically, as part of making the video, they consulted with a bunch of subject matter experts who all reviewed the answer and thought it was okay. I understand the nuance. I agree with you. Obviously, you don\u2019t want to expose your film by taking it outside of a darkroom. There are certain contexts in which it makes sense to do that. If you don\u2019t want to break the camera and if what you\u2019ve taken is not that valuable, it makes sense to do that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re right. There is a lot of nuance to it. Part of what I hope Search serves to do is to give you a lot more context around that answer and allow people to explore it deeply. But I think these are the kinds of things for us to keep getting better at. But to your earlier question, look, I do see the capability frontier continuing to move forward. I think we are a bit limited if we were just training on text data, but we are all making it more multimodal. So I see more opportunities there.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let\u2019s talk about Search. This is the thing that I am most interested in \u2014 I think this is the thing that is changing the most. In an abstract way, it\u2019s the thing that\u2019s the most exciting. You can ask a computer a question, and it will just happily tell you an answer. That feels new. I see the excitement around it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yesterday, you <\/strong>announced AI Overviews are coming to Search<\/strong><\/a>. That\u2019s an extension of what was called the Search Generative Experience, which was announced in a rollout to everyone in the United States. I would describe the reactions to that news from the people who make websites as fundamentally apocalyptic. The CEO of the News\/Media Alliance said to CNN, \u201cThis will be <\/strong>catastrophic to our traffic.<\/strong><\/a>\u201d Another media CEO forwarded me a newsletter and the headline was, \u201c<\/strong>This is a death blow to publishers.<\/strong><\/a>\u201d Were you expecting that kind of response to rolling out AI Overviews in Search?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I recall, in 2010, there were headlines<\/a> that the web was dead. I\u2019ve long worked on the web, obviously. I care deeply about it. When the transition from desktop to mobile happened, there was a lot of concern because people were like, \u201cOh, it\u2019s a small screen. How will people read content? Why would they look at content?\u201d We had started introducing what we internally called \u201cWeb Answers\u201d in 2014, which are featured snippets outside [the list of links]. So you had questions like that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I remain optimistic. Empirically, what we are seeing throughout the years, I think human curiosity is boundless. It\u2019s something we have deeply understood in Search. More than any other company, we will differentiate ourselves in our approach even through this transition. As a company, we realize the value of this ecosystem, and it\u2019s symbiotic. If there isn\u2019t a rich ecosystem making unique and useful content, what are you putting together and organizing? So we feel it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I would say, through all of these transitions, things have played out a bit differently. I think users are looking for high-quality content. The counterintuitive part, which I think almost always plays out, is [that] it\u2019s not a zero-sum game. People are responding very positively to AI Overviews. It\u2019s one of the most positive changes I\u2019ve seen in Search based on metrics. But people do jump off on it. And when you give context around it, they actually jump off it. It actually helps them understand, and so they engage with content underneath, too. In fact, if you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But I understand the sentiment. It\u2019s a big change. These are disruptive moments. AI is a big platform shift. People are projecting out, and people are putting a lot into creating content. It\u2019s their businesses. So I understand the perspective [and] I\u2019m not surprised. We are engaging with a lot of players, both directly and indirectly, but I remain optimistic about how it\u2019ll actually play out. But it\u2019s a good question. I\u2019m happy to talk about it more.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I have this concept I call \u201cGoogle Zero,\u201d which is <\/strong>born of my own paranoia<\/strong><\/a>. Every referrer that The Verge<\/em> has ever had has <\/strong>gone up and then it\u2019s gone down<\/strong><\/a>, and Google is the last large-scale referrer of traffic on the web for almost every website now. And I can see that for a lot of sites, Google Zero is playing out. Their Google traffic has gone to zero, <\/strong>particularly independent sites<\/strong><\/a> that aren\u2019t part of some huge publishing conglomerate. There\u2019s an air purifier blog that we covered <\/strong>called HouseFresh<\/strong><\/a>. There\u2019s a gaming site <\/strong>called Retro Dodo<\/strong><\/a>. Both of these sites have said, \u201cLook, our Google traffic went to zero. Our businesses are doomed.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is that the right outcome here in all of this \u2014 that the people who care so much about video games or air purifiers that they started websites and made the content for the web are the ones getting hurt the most in the platform shift?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s always difficult to talk about individual cases, and at the end of the day, we are trying to satisfy user expectations. Users are voting with their feet, and people are trying to figure out what\u2019s valuable to them. We are doing it at scale, and I can\u2019t answer on the particular site\u2014<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A bunch of small players are feeling the hurt. Loudly, they\u2019re saying it: \u201cOur businesses are going away.\u201d And that\u2019s the thing you\u2019re saying: \u201cWe\u2019re engaging, we\u2019re talking.\u201d But this thing is happening very clearly<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s not clear to me if that\u2019s a uniform trend. I have to look at data on an aggregate [basis], so anecdotally, there are always times when people have come in an area and said, \u201cMe, as a specific site, I have done worse.\u201d But it\u2019s like an individual restaurant saying, \u201cI\u2019ve started getting fewer customers this year. People have stopped eating food,\u201d or whatever it is. It\u2019s not necessarily true. Some other restaurant might have opened next door that\u2019s doing very well. So it\u2019s tough to say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n From our standpoint, when I look historically even over the past decade, we have provided more traffic to the ecosystem<\/a>, and we\u2019ve driven that growth. You may be making a secondary point about small sites versus more aggregating sites, which is the second point you\u2019re talking about. Ironically, there are times when we have made changes to actually send more traffic to the smaller sites. Some of those sites that complain a lot are the aggregators in the middle. So should the traffic go to the restaurant that has created a website with their menus and stuff or people writing about these restaurants? These are deep questions. I\u2019m not saying there\u2019s a right answer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But you\u2019re about to flip over the whole apple cart, right? You\u2019re about to start answering some of these questions very directly. And where that content comes from in the future, I think you want the people who care the most to publish that information directly to be the thing that you synthesize.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The incentives for that seem to be getting lower and lower \u2014 on the web, anyway.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I feel it\u2019s the opposite. If anything, I feel like through AI Overviews, when you give people context, yes, there are times all people want is a quick answer and they bounce back. But overall, when we look at user journeys, when you give the context, it also exposes people to jumping-off points, and so they engage more. Actually, this is what drives growth over time. I look at desktop to mobile, and there were similar questions. In fact, there was a [magazine] cover I\u2019m almost tempted to pull out, saying, \u201cThe web is dead<\/a>.\u201d There was a Google Zero argument 10 years ago. But you yourself made the point that it\u2019s not an accident that we still remain as one of the largest referrers because we\u2019ve cared about it deeply for a long, long time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I look at our journey, even the last year through the Search Generative Experience, and I constantly found us prioritizing approaches that would send more traffic while meeting user expectations. We think through that deeply and we actually change our approach. If there are areas where we feel like we haven\u2019t fully gotten it right, we are careful about rolling it out. But I think what\u2019s positively surprising us is that people engage more, and that will lead to more growth over time for high-quality content.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot of debate about what high-quality content is. At least in my experience, I value independent sources, I value smaller things, I want more authentic voices. And I think those are important attributes we are constantly trying to improve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You mentioned that you think more people will click through links in AI Overviews. Liz [Reid] who runs Search had <\/strong>a blog post making the same claim<\/strong><\/a>. There\u2019s no public data that says that is true yet. Are you going to release that data? Are you going to show people that this is actually happening?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On an aggregate, I think people rely on this value of the ecosystem. If people over time don\u2019t see value, website owners don\u2019t see value coming back from Google, I think we\u2019ll pay a price. We have the right incentive structure. But obviously, look, we are careful about… there are a lot of individual variations, and some of it is users choosing which way to go. That part is hard to sort out. But I do think we are committed at an aggregate level to do the right thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was reading some SEO community trade publications this morning <\/strong>responding to the changes<\/strong><\/a>, and one of the things that was pointed out was that, in Search Console, it doesn\u2019t show you if the clicks are coming from a featured snippet or an AI Overview or just Google\u2019s regular 10 blue links. Would you break that out? Would you commit to breaking that out so people can actually audit and verify and measure that the AI Overviews are sending out as much traffic as you say they are?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s a good question for the Search team. They think about this at a deeper level than I do. I think we are constantly trying to give more visibility, but also we want people to create content that\u2019s good. And we are trying to rank it and organize it, so I think there\u2019s a balance to be had. The more we spec it out, then the more people design for that<\/a>. There\u2019s a tradeoff there, so it\u2019s not clear to me what the right answer is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That tradeoff between what you spec out and say and what people make, that\u2019s been the <\/strong>story of the web for quite some time<\/strong><\/a>. It had reached, I think, <\/strong>a steady state<\/strong><\/a>. Whether you thought that steady state was good or bad, it was at least at a steady state. Now, that state is changing \u2014 AI is obviously changing it. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The 10 blue link model, the old steady state, is very much based on an exchange: \u201cWe\u2019re going to let you index our content. We\u2019re going to [have] featured snippets. We\u2019re going to let you see all of our information. In return, you will send us traffic.\u201d That formed the basis of what you might call a fair-use argument. Google\u2019s going to index this stuff, [and] there\u2019s not going to be a lot of payments in the middle. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the AI era, no one knows how that\u2019s going to go. There are <\/strong>some major lawsuits<\/strong><\/a> happening. There are deals being made by <\/strong>Google<\/strong><\/a> and<\/strong> OpenAI<\/strong><\/a> for training data. Do you think it\u2019s appropriate for Google to start making more deals to pay for data to train search results? Because those AI snippets are not really the same as the 10 blue links or anything else you\u2019ve done in the past.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n To be very clear, there\u2019s a myth that Google\u2019s search has been 10 blue links for \u2014 I look at our mobile experience \u2014 many, many years. And we have had answers, we allow you to refine questions, we\u2019ve had featured snippets, and so on. The product has evolved significantly.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Having said that, as a company, even as we look at AI, we have done Google [News] Showcase, we have done licensing deals. To the extent there is value there, we obviously think there is a case for fair use in the context of beneficial, transformative use. I\u2019m not going to argue that with you given your background. But I think there are cases in which we will see dedicated incremental value to our models, and we\u2019ll be looking at partnerships to get at that. I do think we\u2019ll approach it that way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me ask this question in a different way. I won\u2019t do too much fair-use analysis with you, I promise, as much as I like doing it. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There were some <\/strong>news reports recently<\/strong><\/a> that OpenAI had trained its video generation product, Sora, on YouTube. How did you feel when you heard that news?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Look, we don\u2019t know the details. Our YouTube team is following up and trying to understand it. We have terms and conditions, and we would expect people to abide by those terms and conditions when you build a product, so that\u2019s how I felt about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So you felt like they had potentially broken your terms and conditions? Or if they had, that <\/strong>wouldn\u2019t have been appropriate<\/strong><\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The reason I asked that question \u2014 which is a much more emotional question \u2014 is okay, maybe that\u2019s not appropriate. And what <\/strong>OpenAI has said<\/strong><\/a> is essentially \u201cWe\u2019ve trained on publicly available information,\u201d which means they found it on the web.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Most people don\u2019t get to make that deal. They don\u2019t have a YouTube team of licensing professionals who can say, \u201cWe have terms and conditions.\u201d They don\u2019t even have terms and conditions. They\u2019re just putting their stuff on the internet. Do you understand why, emotionally, there\u2019s the reaction to AI from the creative community \u2014 that it feels<\/em> the same as you might have felt about OpenAI training on YouTube?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Absolutely. Look, be it website owners or content creators or artists, I can understand how emotional a transformation this is. Part of the reason you saw, even through Google I\/O when we were working on products like music generation, we have really taken an approach by which we are working first to make tools for artists. We haven\u2019t put a general-purpose tool out there for anyone to create songs. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The way we have taken that approach in many of these cases is to put the creator community as much at the center of it as possible. We\u2019ve long done that with YouTube. Through it all, we are trying to figure out what the right ways to approach this.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it is a transformative moment as well, and there are other players in this. We are not the only player in the ecosystem. But, to your earlier question, yes, I understand people\u2019s emotions about it. I definitely am very empathetic to how people are perceiving this moment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n They feel like it\u2019s a taking \u2014 that they put work on the internet and the big companies are coming, taking it for free, and then making products that they are charging $20 a month for or that will lift their creative work and remix it for other people. The thing that makes it feel like a taking is [that] very little value accrues back to them. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s really the thing I\u2019m asking about: how do you bring value back to them? How do you bring incentives back to the small creator or the independent business that\u2019s saying, \u201cLook, this feels a taking.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Look. [Sighs] <\/em>The whole reason we\u2019ve been successful on platforms like YouTube is we have worked hard to answer this question. You\u2019ll continue to see us dig deep about how to do this well. And I think the players who end up doing better here will have more winning strategies over time. I genuinely believe that. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Across everything we do, we have to sort that out. Anytime you\u2019re running a platform, it\u2019s the basis on which you can build a sustainable long-term platform. Through this AI moment, over time, there\u2019ll be players who will do better by the content creators that support their platforms, and whoever does it better will emerge as the winner. I believe that to be a tenet of these things over time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One thing that I think is really interesting about the YouTube comparison in particular \u2014 it\u2019s been described to me many times that YouTube is a licensing business. You license a lot of content from the creators. You obviously pay them back in terms of the advertising model there. The music industry has a huge licensing business with YouTube. It is an existential relationship for both sides. Susan Wojcicki used to describe <\/strong>YouTube as a music service<\/strong><\/a>, which I think confused everyone until you <\/strong>looked at the data<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n