ai overviews have actually made google search usable again. i almost never click through anymore though. that breaks the old content model entirely. if creators aren’t getting paid, the web becomes a free exhaust pipe for ai. which is unsustainable. this is why creator payouts on x matter so much. incentives are the system. it’s very easy to imagine google eventually doing creator payouts too because they’ll have no choice. no fresh content → bad answers → product rot. to some extent they are doing content payouts with deals already (reddit deal etc). it's just that they aren't paying creators directly yet. this is also why in the age of ai youtube is now insanely even more valuable to google.