Google CEO Sundar Pichai admitted that there is room for improvement in AI Overview when he was shown the result of a live query for the product during a Decoder podcast interview with Nilay Patel.
Patel showed Photosi the live search result. Photos called it “more opinion than it should be” in the question. The interview was recorded after Google I/O 2026.
What Pichai Says About AI Review Quality
Patel showed Photosi the search result for “best Chromebook” on his phone. AI’s overview provided a confident recommendation. Below it, the Reddit result and the New York Times result each gave different answers.
Photosi replied:
“It probably has more perspective than you should have in a question you showed me. That was my reaction as a user. That’s an opportunity to improve, how can I say it, in a rapidly changing environment, but I would expect that to happen in the product.”
He also suggested that the result may have been specific to Patel’s usage patterns.
Bounce clicks and traffic trends
He talked about traffic problems for publishers, saying that as Google’s technology improves, low-quality clicks are filtered out. He described this as “natural evolution.”
“Bounce clicks are going down,” Photosi said. “And with all that is power.”
VP of Google Search, Liz Reid, described AI Overview as removing “bounce clicks” from useful traffic. Google has not shared data against the publisher to support the claim.
Patel also read a quote from Condé Nast’s CEO, Roger Lynch, who told his teams to plan for no searches. Photosi did not dispute Lynch’s editorial decision. He also did not directly address Lynch’s claim that search traffic has fallen more than Condé Nast predicted each year. He told Patel that he was “not in a position to tell a publisher like that what to think about his business or his program.”
He also mentioned a Search feature that manages sites the user has subscribed to as favorite sources.
“If you’re subscribed to something, we show that as your preferred resource as a user,” he said, calling it “a new innovation that we didn’t have before.”
Why This Matters
Photosi watched the AI Overview live and called it very opinionated in the question. The comments delve into a broader discussion of AI Overview’s effect on organic clicks. A field test found that AIOs reduced each external click on affected search by about 38%, but that study measured click behavior, not whether the AI overview recommendations were accurate.
The description of bounced clicks continues to be a pattern throughout Google’s management visibility. Photosi used the same language Reid used in Bloomberg’s Odd Lots earlier this year. Alphabet’s Q1 earnings showed Google Search and other revenue up 19%. The company still hasn’t released the traffic data publishers will need to verify the claim.
A registration preference signal is a tangible product change to be monitored. Photosi called this “a new change that we didn’t have before.”
Looking Forward
Google added more links to AI Search at I/O. Photosi described the result as showing “the scope of improvement” and added that he would expect such iterations to occur in the product.
SEJ has compiled the I/O announcements and various comments by Photosi about the agent code gap from a Hard Fork interview earlier this week.
