What do AI Answers Mean for Health Care? An Empirical Study of the BrightEdge Query Data and The Impact on Google Search Engines
Adriance said people who had opted in to the test were shown more details on a broader range of queries. The data from BrightEdge sheds light on the topics in which Artificial intelligence Overviews can be most helpful. AI answers appeared on the majority of health care keyword searches, most recently at a frequency of 63 percent. Sample queries included in BrightEdge’s data included “foot infection,” “bleeding bowel,” and “telehealth urgent care.” In comparison, queries about ecommerce return AI Overviews at around 23 percent, while restaurants or travel very rarely trigger AI overview answers.
Jim Yu, the founder and executive chairman of Bright Edge, said that the drop off suggests that Google has decided to be careful with the introduction of new features. “There’s obviously some risks they’re trying to tightly manage,” he says. But Yu adds that he’s generally optimistic about how Google is approaching AI Overviews, and sees these early problems as a “blip” rather than a feature.
How Do You Get Your Writing Out of Google? Claude’s Chatbot, Anthropic, and the Law of Copyright: An Interview with Janet Fries
I agree with you that the fact based aspect of my writing does make the situation complicated, because I am not the first to suggest focusing on your intended audience. It’s hard for me, though, to imagine a world where Google arrives at that exact paragraph about Claude’s chatbot in its AI Overview results without referencing my work first.
While many AI lawsuits remain unresolved, one legal expert I spoke with who specializes in copyright law was skeptical whether I could win any hypothetical litigation. “I think you would not have a strong case for copyright infringement,” says Janet Fries, an attorney at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath. “Copyright law, generally, is careful not to get in the way of useful things and helpful things.” Her perspective explained that it’s difficult to make a claim about instructional or fact-based writing, like my advice column, versus more creative work, like poetry.
“We can see that links in the artificial intelligence overviews get more clicks than if the page had been listed as a traditional web listing,” said the Google spokesman. It is impossible to verify the impact of the feature on click-through rates, as there was no data to support this claim. The company compared the traffic from the AI Overview to traditional blue link traffic from GOOGLE, not articles that were chosen for a featured sidebar, which may result in higher rates.
The search engine giant acknowledged in an email exchange that parts of writing may be derived from web pages but they denied that they were doing anything differently than their original sources. The first paragraph of the answer is not attributed to me. My original article was hyperlinked near the bottom of the result. Since source links are so far down, it is hard to believe that any publisher would ever receive traffic in this situation.
The following piece of information was from an interview I did with one of the product developers at Anthropic. There is a portion of the answer to the question about using Anthropic’s chatbot on the right. It feels like a classroom cheating teacher who just copied an answer from my homework and barely even tried to change the wording of the answer.
Last week, an AI Overview search result from Google used one of my WIRED articles in an unexpected way that makes me fearful for the future of journalism.