Google is testing AI-powered article reviews on participating publications’ Google News pages as part of a new pilot program, the search giant announced Wednesday.
News publishers participating in the pilot include Der Spiegel, El País, Folha, Infobae, Kompas, The Guardian, The Times of India, The Washington Examiner and The Washington Post, among others.
The purpose of the new commercial partnership program is to “explore how artificial intelligence can lead to more engaged audiences,” Google said in a blog post. As part of the new AI pilot program, the company will work with publishers to experiment with new features in Google News.
By adding AI-powered article reviews, Google says users will have more content before they click to read an article. While AI-generated summaries may result in fewer clicks on news articles, publications participating in the commercial pilot program will receive direct payments from Google, which could offset the potential drop in traffic to their websites.
AI-powered article reviews will only appear on the Google News pages of participating publications and not anywhere else in Google News or Search.
This isn’t the first time Google has introduced AI summaries for news. In July, the company introduced AI summaries to Discover, the main news feed in Google’s search app. With this change, users no longer see a single headline from a major post in the feed. Instead, they see the logos of several news publishers in the upper left corner, followed by an AI-generated summary citing those sources.
Google is also experimenting with audio updates for people who prefer to listen to the news rather than read it, as part of the new pilot program.
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The company says these features will include clear reporting and a link to articles.
In addition, Google works with organizations such as Estadão, Antara, Yonhap and The Associated Press to integrate real-time information and improve results in the Gemini app.
“As the way people consume information evolves, we’ll continue to improve our products for people around the world and get feedback from stakeholders across the ecosystem,” Google wrote in its blog post. “We do this work in partnership with sites and creators of all sizes, from major news publishers to new and emerging voices.”
As part of Google’s announcement on Wednesday, the company said it is rolling out the Preferred Sources feature globally, after first rolling it out in the US and India in August. The feature allows users to select their favorite news sites and blogs to appear in the Top Stories section of Google search results.
In the coming days, the feature will be available for English-speaking users around the world, and Google plans to roll it out to all supported languages early next year.
Google will now also highlight links from your news subscriptions and display those links in a dedicated carousel in the Gemini app in the coming weeks, with AI Overview and AI Mode to follow.
While these features make it easier for users to access news from their preferred sources, they also risk confining them to an ideological bubble that limits their exposure to different perspectives.
Google also announced that it is increasing the number of built-in links in the AI mode. Additionally, it introduces “contextual introductions” for embedded links, which are short explanations explaining why a link might be useful to explore.
