Missing links: Where are sources in Google's AI search results? - Search Engine Land

Google’s introduction of Bard yesterday was huge news.

But perhaps the bigger news for SEOs was the preview of Google’s generative AI search results, which featured a grand total of zero links.

That’s right. Google – a search engine – no longer links to its sources.

You know, websites.

What do you call a search engine that copies mass amounts of content from others to create its own content, without providing any credit (links)?

I believe we still call that a scraper site.

A popular 2014 tweet about Google being a scraper site remains maybe even more relevant today:

As I’ve been digesting all the AI in search results news, the Harvey Dent quote from “The Dark Knight” popped into my mind: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

Now, this isn’t going to be another rant about Google being evil.

However, Google is playing a delicate game here.

Glenn Gabe called this an “act of war against publishers” on Twitter. And he’s not wrong.

For 24 years, Google has provided answers to queries in the form of a list of websites (or in carousels, or some other SERP format).

And over that time, user behavior has changed.

People want instant answers. We don’t always want to wade through 2,500-word articles when a question can be answered in 2-3 sentences or paragraphs. We’ve all complained about having to scroll past the epic backstories that precede nearly all recipe content.

Google has increasingly provided those answers in the form of search...

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