Google Expands AI-Powered Search Summaries to 6 New Countries Worldwide

Google adds six more countries to where AI-generated search summaries are available. This increases the service’s global reach and addresses worries about its accuracy.

Alphabet, the company that owns Google, said on Thursday that it would be bringing its AI-generated summaries for search questions to six more countries. Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, India, Britain, and Japan are some of these countries.

There is a summary at the top of search results before regular web links. This function is called AI Overviews. AI Overviews was released to all US users in May after a year-long test period. It was criticized for giving truly incorrect answers, such as a pizza recipe with glue as an ingredient and a false statement about the religion of former US President Barack Obama.

Google knew about these problems and updated the feature to limit which questions would show AI answers and to block material from websites like Reddit that was made by users.

Google is also testing links in the summary text to drive traffic to related websites and adding more hyperlinks to the feature. Websites will be shown next to AI-generated answers.

The goal of this update is to find a balance between Google’s needs, those of users, and those of publishers. This is because the media business is worried that the AI feature could cause them to lose referral traffic.