The final session on this first day of the AANZCA 2025 conference starts with my QUT colleague Shir Weinbrand, whose focus is on the emergence of AI Overviews in Google Search. These are a relatively new addition which fundamentally changes how search engines work: they provide an AI-generated synthesis of search results rather than pointing users to the search results themselves.
How are these changes being framed; how are different actors describing these changes – Google itself, technology journalists, and SEO marketers? This study engaged in computational concept mapping of the discourses around AI Overviews between May 2024 and May 2025; it identified four major discourse frames.
AIOs were portrayed by Google as especially efficient; journalists were much more sceptical, while SEO marketers were torn between profit and worry. Ordinary users were considerably less present in the coverage. This shows how AIO are being discursively shaped by these different actors, and how they themselves are reshaping what counts as knowledge. Users must be brought further into this conversation, and similar analyses should also be done on similar AI summary systems on other search platforms.
