Nilay Patel of The Verge had a great one-on-one conversation with Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO. Nilay did put on the pressure around how the changes with AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search are impacting publishers in a very negative way, but Sundar seemed unconvinced that web publishing is dead.
Sundar said that he is seeing 45% more content on the web in the past two years than the previous and he said it is not due to AI tools generating that content.
He also outright disagreed with Nilay about starting The Verge again would not make sense in the format it is. He responded saying, "I'm not fully sure I agree." He said, "I think, you know, I think if you were to go and restart Verge again, I bet you would start a, you would've a extraordinary web presence."
He even said that "you will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web." Adding that his competitors don't care about publishers, he said, "look at other companies, newer emerging companies, they openly talk about it as something they're not going to do."
Here is the video embed:
The good stuff starts at around 16:50 into the interview.
Here are some select quotes I want to pull out:
It depends. I think people are consuming a lot more information, and the web is one specific format. We should talk about the web, but zooming back out, there are new platforms like YouTube and others. I think people are just consuming a lot more information, right? It feels like an expansionary moment.I think there are more creators, and people are putting out more content. And so people are generally doing a lot more. Maybe people have a little extra time on their hands, and so it’s a combination of all that. On the web, look, things that have been interesting and… We’ve had these conversations for a while. Obviously, in 2015, there was this famous meme, “The web is dead.” I always have it somewhere around, and I look at it once in a while. Predictions… It has existed for a while. I think the web is evolving pretty profoundly. I think that is true.
When we crawl, when we look at the number of web pages available to us, that number has gone up by 45% in the last two years alone. Right? So that's a staggering thing to think of.
I think people are producing a lot of content and I see consumers consuming a lot of content.
We generally have many techniques in search to try and understand the quality of a page, including whether it was machine generated, etcetera.
That doesn't explain the trend we are seeing, right? So generally there are more webpages, right?
Nilay: There's something very interesting happening there. As a media platform, it feels like it's at an all time low, right? If I was starting The Verge. - The web as a media platform. - The web is a media platform. As an information platform. If I was starting The Verge today with 11 of my co-founders and friends, we would start a TikTok channel. We might start a YouTube channel. We would definitely not start a website with the dependencies we have as a website today. And that's the dynamic that it feels like AI is pushing on even harder.Sundar: I'm not fully sure I agree, right? I think, you know, I think if you were to go and restart Verge again, I bet you would start a, you would've a extraordinary web presence.
Look, I, you know, first of all, through all the products, I mean, AI mode is gonna have sources and you know, we are very committed as a direction, as a product direction to make sure, I think part of why people come to Google is to experience that breadth of the web and go in the direction they want to, right? So I view us as giving more context. Yes, there are certain questions which may get answers, but overall, that's the pattern we see today, right? And if anything, over the last year, it's clear to us the breadth of where we are sending people to is increasing. And so I expect that to be true with AI mode as well, right?
Look, more than, you're always going to have areas where people are robustly debating value exchanges, etcetera, right? Like app developers and platforms. That's not on the web, etcetera, right? It's inherently, you know, there's always going to be, when you're running a platform, these debates. I would challenge, I think more than any other company, we think about, we prioritize sending traffic to the web. No one sends traffic to the web in the way we do. I look at other companies, newer emerging companies, they openly talk about it as something they're not going to do, right? We are the only ones which make it a high priority, agonize and so on. Look, we'll engage, and you know, we've always engaged. There are going to be debates through it all. But we are committed to, you know, I've said this before, everything we do across all, you will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web. I think that's the product direction we are committed to. I think it's what users look for when they come to Google, right? And the nature of it will evolve. But, you know, I, you know, I'm confident that that's the direction we'll continue taking.
Look, the way we look at it is, I mean, obviously we take a lot of, we are definitely sending traffic to a wider range of sources, publishers, because, just like we've done over 25 years, we've been through the same with featured snippets, the quality of, you know, it's higher quality referral traffic too, so, right? And we can observe it because the time and people spend as one metric and that are other ways by which we measure quality of our outbound traffic is also increasing. So, and overall, through this transition, I think generally AI always are also growing and, you know, the growth compounds over time. So whenever we have worked through these transitions, it ends up posted. That's how Google has worked for 25 years. And, you know, and we end up sending more traffic over time. So that's how I would expect all this to play out.
No, look, we are sending traffic to a broader source of people. People may be, you know, surfacing more content, looking at more content, so somebody individually may see less. I mean, there are all kinds of, at the end of the day, we are reflecting what users want, right? You know, if you do the wrong thing, users won't use our product, go somewhere else, right? And so you have, you know, you have all these dynamics underway and I think we have genuinely, you know, we took a long time designing I/O views and we are constantly trading in a way that it prioritizes, you know, sources and sending traffic to the web.
You can read the full transcript over here.
It is also worth listening to the end when they talk about agentic stuff. I mean, it seems Sundar sees the future for publishers and site owners very differently than how we think he sees it. It seems a bit concerning for me that we are so off base here, doesn't it?
Forum discussion at X.
