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Google has not yet announced a date when it will fully launch the app Generative experience with Google Search (SGE). We know Google has started SGE testing in the wild with a small portion of American searchers, that actually seemed to have disappeared live today.
But when will Google roll out SGE and AI overviews to all searchers in the US and other regions – Google hasn’t announced that yet.
Google I/O on May 14. There are some rumors going around that Google could launch SGE, at least in the US and some other regions, on May 14, during the Google I/O keynote address, with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai on stage.
I mean, it makes sense to launch SGE at I/O – it’s Google’s biggest and most notable event of the year.
But then again, Google hasn’t told me on the record or on record that SGE will ever go fully live, let alone launch on a specific date. Actually, we had to have squashed some rumors about this before. Google once had a deadline of December 2023just google it that period has been deleted and did not launch SGE.
How might SGE launch? If Google does launch SGE in the near future, I believe it will be done in a way that doesn’t disrupt their search advertising. I think Google would launch AI summaries on search results that generally don’t contain ads.
In fact, Google has said that most searches people perform every day won’t show search ads. And in general, AI answers are better for longer queries that may not contain ads anyway.
Google should be concerned about how the SGE interface will impact search ad clicks, its main source of revenue. So if Google launched SGE but didn’t show it in search results with ads on it, that would solve the revenue problem.
Google will also likely try to avoid showing AI summaries for searches that are politically or generally sensitive in nature.
Right now there are plenty of examples where the AI responses in SGE just look really bad. It reminds me of when Google launched featured snippets, there were plenty of embarrassing examples to point out.
So if Google can figure out a way to limit AI summaries and not show them for those categories, Google can technically launch this.
Can users unsubscribe? Right now, SGE is a lab experiment that you can opt in and out of. But now that SGE is being tested in the wild, those in that testing group won’t be able to opt out.
I noticed complaints today, when Google just started rolling out SGE’s live testing, where users want to opt out but can’t.
Why we care. Many in our industry are tense about the launch of SGE. Those who buy ads in Google search results are concerned about how this will impact clicks and conversions. Those who publish content are also concerned about how traffic from Google’s organic search results could differ with launch. And content producers worry that Google will take their content, provide the answer to the searcher, and not profit from a single impression on their site.
Google has said it will continue to prioritize approaches that drive valuable traffic to publishers. Google also said that they are showing more links to sites with SGE in Search than before, creating new opportunities for content discovery. But do searchers click on those links?
So stay tuned – as we learn more about when SGE will launch, and where and how, we’ll keep you all posted.
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