Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools. That’s according to a new Financial Times report citing “three people with knowledge of [Google’s] plans.”
Charging for any part of the search engine at the core of its business would be a first for Google, which has funded its search product solely with ads since 2000. But it’s far from the first time Google would charge for AI enhancements in general; the “AI Premium” tier of a Google One subscription costs $10 more per month than a standard “Premium” plan, for instance, while “Gemini Business” adds $20 a month to a standard Google Workspace subscription.
While those paid products offer access to Google’s high-end “Gemini Advanced” AI model, Google also offers free access to its less performant, plain “Gemini” model without any kind of paid subscription.
Oh no, if I don’t give them money, I won’t get LLM enshitification? The horror!
Paying for the privilege of using AI to sift through the vast bleak sea of AI generated garbage. What a time to be alive!
Something something they make us buy the cure for the disease they created?
Does that mean I can opt out? nice!
that doesn’t mean they would not feed your data to that LLM.
Good, that means they won’t try to force them on me.
They will absolutely try to force the paid feature on you. How many times have you seen the youtube premium prompt?
None
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that… but I mostly watch YouTube through Grayjay, or on a browser with adblocking enabled.
I don’t have that blocked, and use the youtube website, so I see it at least once a week.
You don’t use any adblockers on YouTube?
I do, I just don’t have the premium prompt blocked
Ah, sorry, I didn’t realize that there was an ad-blocker that didn’t block the premium prompt.
I mean I have ublock origin and it still shows up between rows of videos.
This means we won’t be getting the results we already get.
Or we are going to get the results we got when google was good, but with money.
“We ruin results until payments improve.”
Hopefully this will backfire and just push people to use alternative search engines. Unlike YouTube and other subscription services, Google Search doesn’t have any exclusive rights to content.
Good news, in my opinion. I don’t think users see the value in of AI and so maybe sites will go back to catering to organic results instead.
Just kidding Google will just make the non-AI search experience so bad that people are forced to sign up for their AI subscription
It’s already bad, they don’t have to do anything to make it bad. The real issue will be if they try to make it so it’s AI or nothing.
My first thought was “thank God! Maybe I won’t have to scroll past their AI results to get to actual search results”.
Kagi needs better android integration. I hate searching ony phone now because I can’t use kagi easily.
Probably because they haven’t figured out a way to tie Ad-sense to an AI engine.
I don’t want AI feature, subscription lock sounds good to me.
Good!
Who is Google?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools.
While those paid products offer access to Google’s high-end “Gemini Advanced” AI model, Google also offers free access to its less performant, plain “Gemini” model without any kind of paid subscription.
“SGE never feels like a useful addition to Google Search,” Ars’ Ron Amadeo wrote last month.
Regardless, the current tech industry mania surrounding anything and everything related to generative AI may make Google feel it has to integrate the technology into some sort of “premium” search product sooner rather than later.
Last month, the company announced it was redoubling its efforts to limit the appearance of “spammy, low-quality content”—much of it generated by AI chatbots—in its search results.
In February, Google shut down the image generation features of its Gemini AI model after the service was found inserting historically inaccurate examples of racial diversity into some of its prompt responses.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 52%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Imagine me paying to give my data to feed their info beast. No thanks. I can run my own AI tools.
I don’t even want those features for free, why would I pay for it? lol
Oh thank god, I’ll be able to avoid seeing it by just not paying.
Would love to see Google do pay to play for this instead of devious pay with your usage data and ads (although likely they will do both)
The largest number in the world isn’t big enough to describe the % chance they double dip. Ironically I think the 2nd largest numbers are called googols, after grahams number, IIRC.
I’m not entirely sure that’s how percentages work here, but regardless maybe they’ll give you a reach around or something on this plan at least…
