Season 4, Episode 10: AI Overviews and consequences for the open web (with Paul Bannister)

My guest on this week's episode of the podcast is Paul Bannister, the Chief Strategy Officer at Raptive. Paul is returning to the podcast for the third time; see the first two episodes here and here.

Our topic of discussion is Google's AI Overviews product, which I profiled in Google's Gambit. Among other things, we cover:

• How web publishers perceive AI Overviews;
• Whether AI Overviews have yet appreciably impacted publisher traffic;
• How AI Overviews might fit into Google's broader strategy with respect to the Open Web and Cookie deprecation;
• Google's claim that AI Overviews result in increased clicks to publisher websites;
• Whether AI Overviews can fortify Google against competition from other LLM-based search or chatbots, like Perplexity;
• Whether AI Overviews incentivize publishers to license their data to Google in exchange for exposure;
• Google's Quick View feature;
• What it means that Google's share of the search advertising market is expected to drop below 50% in 2025.

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Vibe. Vibe is the leading Streaming TV ad platform for small and medium-sized businesses looking for actionable advertising campaign performance.
• ⁠⁠⁠Clarisights⁠⁠⁠. Marketing analytics that makes it easy to get answers, iterate fast, and show the impact of your work. Go to⁠⁠⁠ clarisights.com/demo⁠⁠⁠ to try it out for free.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.