Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Junior SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
YouTube is set to test out an AI Overview carousel for selected search queries on their site. This comes after Google rolled out AI Overviews on their search engine worldwide last year, causing a major shift in the way users interact with search.
What are AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are rich snippets that appear at the top of a search engine, collated by AI, that give users a comprehensive response to their queries. This allows users to find answers to certain queries without having to visit websites and makes for a quicker experience on search. How this translates to YouTube will be in the form of video carousels that highlight relevant parts of selected videos to give users an answer to their search queries.
How will this affect YouTube Search?
YouTube AI Overviews are being designed to help users with different types of queries, including Travel and local discovery and product search and will initially be rolled out to a selected number of users in the US.
This news may not be overly positive for YouTube creators, however. Since AI Overviews were introduced on Google search in May last year, many users have seen a decline in traffic to their sites, especially sites answering informational queries, as users are reading AI Overviews and not clicking through to the relevant articles.
If users begin to use the AI Overviews on YouTube, this could see a decline in traffic to YouTube channels and negatively impact viewing figures, just as we have seen with the decline in web traffic on Google. Also, if the AI Overviews are successful, we are likely to see them expand out to other queries, which mirror the current state of Google, where AI Overviews are expanding into different types of queries every month, growing in influence.
When to expect changes
This is currently only an experiment with AI Overviews on YouTube and by no means will it definitively roll out to an expanded audience but if it does it could drastically change how users interact with content on YouTube even perhaps enhancing viewing figures for some smaller users who manage to create relevant and engaging clips that make their way into the AI Overviews.
