YouTube rolls out AI search results for Premium users: Will it impact views, engagement?
Google is bringing AI-generated search results to YouTube as part of its broader efforts to reinvent the traditional search experience of users by integrating generative AI across its entire ecosystem.
The AI-generated search results on the video sharing platform will appear at the top of the results page. It will feature multiple YouTube videos along with an AI-generated summary of each video. Users can tap on the thumbnails of the videos to begin playing them directly from the search results.
The AI-generated summary accompanying each video will include information that is most relevant to the user's search query. However, the AI-powered search experience on the platform is currently limited to YouTube Premium subscribers. It is an opt-in feature, which means that Premium subscribers will have to manually enable the feature by visiting YouTube's experimental page.
The move signals Google's shift towards generative AI-based search and discovery with AI-summarised answers replacing traditional links. Similar to AI Overviews in Google Search, this feature is designed to appear above organic search results as part of the big tech company's strategy to have more of its users engage with its AI systems.
'In the coming days, our conversational AI tool will be expanding to some non-Premium users in the US. Premium members already love it for getting more info, recommendations, and even quizzing themselves on key concepts in academic videos,' YouTube said in a blog post published on June 26.
While only YouTube Premium subscribers can currently choose to see AI-generated search results on the platform, it is likely that Google will expand access to all users in the future.
By showing AI-generated summaries of videos, YouTube users might be less inclined to open videos and watch them on the platform. The feature could also have an impact on engagement as fewer users might comment, subscribe, and generally interact with content creators.
Something similar is already happening in web search. Multiple studies have shown that people are increasingly looking for information by asking questions to chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini as opposed to using web browsers like Safari. This defection away from traditional search engines towards generative AI has negative consequences, especially for publishers and websites that have relied on search traffic to generate revenue.
A recent study by content licensing platform TollBit found that news sites and blogs receive 96 per cent less referral traffic from generative AI-driven search engines than from traditional Google Search. When asked about publishers seeing a dip in traffic coming from Search, Elizabeth Reid, the head of Google Search, previously told indianexpress.com, 'We see that the clicks to web pages when AI Overviews exist are of higher quality. People spend more time on these pages and engage more. They are expressing higher satisfaction with the responses when we show the AI Overviews.'
Even though the video is just one tap away, the AI-generated summary in YouTube search results will probably give users an idea of all the relevant parts of the video. This could potentially make it harder for YouTube channels to grow and earn revenue. In addition, YouTube is bringing its Veo 3 AI video generation model to YouTube Shorts in the coming months, according to CEO Neal Mohan.
The AI model capable of generating cinematic-level visuals with complete sound and dialogue, was reportedly trained on subsets of the 20-billion video library uploaded on YouTube.
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