Google's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. Google's AI mode is advertised on 30 October 2025 in London, United Kingdom. 'I miss old Google': readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI G oogle has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is trying to introduce more search choices where Google has the tightest control: Android smartphones and the Chrome browser. The regulator has proposed allowing users to choose their preferred search provider on those platforms so Google's own search engine isn't used automatically. The CMA also wants to change rules around AI assistants and require search providers to give clearer attribution to publisher content when used. The new proposal follows measures recommended at the beginning of 2026. The CMA's latest proposal has three primary recommendations.

Google said it will change its Search services in the EU in an effort to sidestep some of the 890 million ( 1 billion) in fines levied by the European Commission earlier this summer. The EU charged a fine of 460 million ( 534 million) on claims that Google had abused its dominance in search to prioritize the brand's other services when displaying query results. That sanction was the latest salvo between the EU government and a US tech company for infringing on its Digital Markets Act. The debate centers on the DMA requirement that major tech brands "must not treat their own services more favorably in ranking than third-party services." Google first laid out some of its planned changes to its services in response to the Digital Markets Act in March 2024.

Say More Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Switch Off Creator Playbook Mashable Voices Trending Now Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List In My Bag All Series EU adds ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox to its list of'very large' online platforms The three services now have four months to comply with the EU's toughest platform rules. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and . The European Commission announced Sunday that it has formally designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine, and both Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms, under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA).

The European Union has fined Google 890 million euros ($1bn), saying the technology giant broke digital antitrust rules by steering users of Google Play and its search engine towards its own services and apps at the expense of rivals. Thursday's penalty is the latest in Brussels' crackdown on Big Tech, which has seen the bloc lead the world in reining in the largest firms from Silicon Valley to Beijing. The European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, said it was acting in the interest of consumers. "The best products should succeed because they're better, not because they're owned by the company running the search engine. And European consumers have a right to be told by app developers where to sign up to the best offers, even when the app store owner does not get a cut," said Teresa Ribera, the commission's executive vice president for clean, just and competitive transition.

Google Search AI poses'unacceptable risk' to kids, report finds A new report from a California-based nonprofit says the artificial intelligence features built in to Alphabet's Google Search pose an unacceptable risk" to children. The artificial intelligence features built in to Alphabet's Google Search pose an "unacceptable risk" to children, according to a new report from the Youth AI Safety Institute at Common Sense Media, a California-based nonprofit. The study found that on test accounts configured for minors, the ubiquitous search engine's AI features failed to detect suicide risks, said an eating disorder symptom was normal, and provided instructions for creating deepfakes, or sexually explicit fake content. The report added that unlike standalone chatbots, Google's AI tools are built directly into the default search experience on school and personal devices, currently offering administrators or parents no way to disable them. The report specifically evaluated AI Overviews, which generate automated answers above traditional search results, and AI Mode, a conversational feature that lets users chat back and forth with the search engine. Rather than matching searches to a list of external links, the new features use generative AI to answer complex questions directly on the search page -- a format critics say presents the automated summaries as if they are definitive answers.

The hosting platform wants sites to have more control over how AI companies use their content. Cloudflare has announced plans to automatically block mixed-use web crawlers that index websites for search engines and act as AI agents and trainers at the same time. The company previously offered its customers the optional ability to prevent crawlers from scraping their sites for AI chatbots, but now Cloudflare's stance is becoming more defensive by default. Now that the majority of traffic on the Internet is non-human, we must go further and act faster so that a sustainable ecosystem can emerge, Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO and co-founder shared in a statement. Cloudflare's new tools and partnerships give website owners increased visibility and commercial opportunities and benefit AI companies that have bots with clear and transparent intent.

Russia’s “Project 2026” wasn’t just to spread misinformation on social media — its main goal to create an alternative information ecosystem.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming search engines into Conversational Search Engines (CSE). Consequently, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is being shifted into Conversational Search Engine Optimization (C-SEO). We are beginning to see dedicated C-SEO methods for modifying web documents to increase their visibility in CSE responses. However, they are often tested only for a limited breadth of application domains; we do not know whether certain C-SEO methods would be effective for a broad range of domains. Moreover, existing evaluations consider only a single-actor scenario where only one web document adopts a C-SEO method; in reality, multiple players are likely to competitively adopt the cutting-edge C-SEO techniques, drawing an analogy from the dynamics we have seen in SEO.

The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates. A local court in Germany has issued a ruling that could reshape the operation of search engines and artificial-intelligence-based chatbots worldwide. The Munich Regional Court preliminarily ruled that Google is liable for a series of false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature, requiring the company to prevent the dissemination of erroneous or inaccurate claims through its search engine. The ruling stems from a case first reported by the Decoder, in which two publishers discovered that Google's AI-generated summaries linked them, in certain searches, to questionable business practices, scams, and subscription-related frauds, without any basis for doing so. Earlier this year, the affected companies sent the tech giant a cease-and-desist letter, according to the report.