It keeps you on there site. Same reason Twitter banned links and has grok now, the longer you stay on the site the more likely you are to look at or even click on an ad on that site. If you google something, then quickly scroll past the first couple ad links and click on the first non ad link you are maybe only staying on Google for 1 or 2 seconds. If you get an “ai overview” at the top and start reading through that then you’re maybe spending 10-30 seconds reading through that. That’s another 10 seconds that the ad was displayed that Google can go to there ad customers and say people were looking at it longer.

Another reason more motivated by user experience is also that the AI has a better “understanding” of meaning compared to typical search algorithms. Say you search “Starbucks price at closing” when you meant “Starbucks stock price at time of market closing” an AI would be more able to discern that meaning as opposed to a traditional algorithm which may show you the closing time of the nearest Starbucks, or the price of one of there drinks etc.

That may be true for small or mid size startups that are reliant on VC money, but we’re talking about Google and Microsoft here, they already have there money printers going and don’t need VC money.

They had just as much control with the old search algorithm, though. They could still pick and choose what you see on the search results with their opaque algorithm. The only difference would be that instead of only showing some regime captured media outlet they could generate there own narrative on the fly, but it’s not like there’s a shortage of sycophantic media written by actual people they could pull from.