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Update (March 5th, 5:30pm ET): The article has been updated to clarify with a statement from a Google spokesperson.
What you need to know
- Google is considering locking some AI features in search behind subscriptions.
- In terms of features, Search Generative Experience started as an experimental Search Labs feature, but has since expanded to more users.
- Google already offers premium features to subscribers through its Google One AI Premium plan, which costs $20 per month.
Google is hard at work developing artificial intelligence capabilities, some of which leverage the company’s dominance in search. For example, Search Generative Experience (SGE) is an AI-based feature that creates summaries from a user’s web results in response to a user’s query in Google Search. Currently, features like SGE are free, but a new report from the Financial Times suggests that Google may not maintain this model forever. Google search’s SGE and other AI features may come at a cost.
Google hasn’t been shy about asking users to pay for advanced AI tools across its suite of services. The company brought his Duet AI subscription service for business users to Google Workspace last year. (This subscription has now been rebranded to Gemini for Workspace.) Recently, Google started offering a consumer-level Google One AI Premium subscription that gives you access to features such as Gemini Advanced. It’s not a huge leap for Google to want to bring other AI tools under the subscription umbrella.
The Financial Times “spoke to three people with knowledge of the following.” [Google’s] Google said it is considering adding search generation AI capabilities to its subscription service. The report states that Google is actively developing a system of subscription-based features, but no decisions have been made yet.
Android Central reached out to Google for comment and received the following statement from a spokesperson:
“For years, we have been reinventing search to help people access information in the way that feels most natural to them. Our experiments with generative AI in search have already addressed billions of queries. We are seeing an increase in search queries. We serve all major markets. We continue to rapidly improve our products to meet the needs of new users. We are committed to an ad-free search experience. There is no need to consider or consider it.
As we have done many times before, we will continue to build new premium features and services to enhance our subscription offerings across Google. ”
Google said it has nothing to announce at this time regarding potential plans. However, Google’s statement does not exclude the possibility of offering paid AI search features in the future. In fact, the company’s stated desire to strengthen its subscription services may indicate that Google is leaning toward that idea.
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