Liz Reid On Progression Of Google AI Search

Alex Heath and Ellis Hamburger interviewed Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, on Google’s progression of AI into Search. It felt like a very candid interview that is worth listening to.

In short, Liz is still not sure if Gemini and Google Search will ever fully converge or not. She does see a lot of opportunity with personalization in Google Search. Slop, not just AI slop, is something Google has been fighting for a while.

Danny Goodwin at Search Engine Land also covered this.

Here is my video:

Here are my notes:

• Search was never really static before AI, i.e. knowledge graph, etc – search has changed a lot over the years.
• Google takes responsibility for the pace of change very seriously. So Google doesn’t want to change too much and make it hard but they also see a lot of opportunities with these new features. So labs, opt in, and slow roll out is common.
• People really picked up on AI Overviews very quickly
• AI Agents will do a lot of the work but it won’t be exclusive, only agents. People still want to hear from the source directly.
• Google will adapt to AI Agents like Google did for mobile
• Liz spoke about BERT, MUM, Google Lens, and other AI products
• Gemini vs Google Search: They share the underlining models together; and work together to improve the models for users. Gemini is more productivity or creation and search is more information based and connecting with the web.
• Liz doesn’t know if Gemini and Search ever converge or not.
• How people are using multiple tools is evolving, people are jumping from ChatGPT to Google to others.
• People are using other tools but still, Google Search is growing. It is not a zero sum game.
• Google Personal Intelligence is one of Google’s first step to personalizing responses to the user
• People have created a lot of slop before AI, AI just makes it much more scalable. So Google has a bunch of experience with this and spam.
• AI can create better content, and it also can create slop.
• Google has to fight the AI slop, to make sure to get the great content.
• Plus, publishers need to create great content.
• People are switching to user generated content, listening to more podcasts, etc. People are going to UGC over journalists.
• Google’s job is to surface that awesome content.
• Google can understand audio and video content well.
• Paid wall content, if allowed, Google can crawl it.
• Pay walls are also complicated for users, because some won’t pay.
• Search is able to find most of the content and new opportunities are being created with this new content.
• Liz mentioned preferred sources, so users can say they like a site and Google will show that site more often
• Google should also surface the publishers that user is paying for, not the others, if they have content that matches because that user have access to that content already.
• There is a real opportunity for personalization, to show content that user trusts

Forum discussion at X.