Google pilots AI Overviews in Google News with Times of India among nine global partners

New Delhi: Google has launched a pilot to test AI-generated article overviews on Google News, partnering with nine leading publishers worldwide, including The Times of India, as it looks to change how users discover and consume news on its platforms.

The AI-written summaries appear on participating publishers’ article pages in Google News, giving readers a short overview and links before they click through to the full story. Google says the feature is designed to provide more context and drive “more engaged audiences” while keeping clear attribution and traffic flowing back to publisher sites, rather than replacing original content.

The pilot is a commercial partnership with Der Spiegel (Germany), El País (Spain), Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil), Infobae (Argentina), Kompas (Indonesia), The Guardian (UK), The Times of India (India), The Washington Examiner (US) and The Washington Post (US). The cohort has been selected to represent different languages and markets as Google tests how AI summaries and related tools perform in real-world news environments.

Google has framed the experiment as part of a wider effort to “support the web”, saying Search and other products already send billions of clicks a day to publishers and creators and that users now want faster answers, more context and clearer links to sources they trust.

As part of this push, Google is rolling out a ‘Preferred Sources’ feature in Search globally, allowing users to customise the Top Stories module to see more results from outlets they choose. Early tests show nearly 90,000 different sites have been marked as preferred, and when users select a source, they are, on average, twice as likely to click through to that publisher.

Google is also adding a new way to surface paid and free news subscriptions by highlighting links from subscribed publications in a dedicated carousel. This will launch first in the Gemini app, with AI Overviews and AI Mode to follow, making it easier for users to spot content from titles they already pay for or follow regularly.

Alongside this, Google is increasing the number of inline links within AI Mode answers and redesigning how those links appear, including short contextual introductions that explain why a cited page may be useful. Its Web Guide experiment, which groups related links into AI-organised topic clusters for complex searches, has been upgraded to run about twice as fast and is being shown on more queries in the main ‘All’ tab for users opted into tests.

Beyond the UX tweaks, the company is formalising its commercial framework around AI. Google says it now has paid content and display-rights partnerships with more than 3,000 publications, platforms and providers in over 50 countries, and the AI overviews pilot sits inside a new programme that compensates participating news publishers while they co-develop features such as article summaries and audio briefings.

In parallel, Google is working with agencies including Estadão, Antara, Yonhap and The Associated Press to feed real-time updates into the Gemini app, so that AI experiences can surface fresher, more reliable information linked back to original reporting.

The company has also been expanding its AI Overviews and AI Mode features in Search more broadly, and recently announced plans to show more inline source links after criticism from publishers and regulators that AI layers were capturing attention without sending enough traffic out.

The changes come against a backdrop of growing scrutiny. The European Commission has opened an investigation into whether Google’s AI summaries and related practices could impose unfair conditions on publishers or disadvantage rival services. 

Independent studies have also flagged the risk that AI overviews keep users within Google’s interface and reduce click-throughs to news sites, intensifying long-standing concerns about the sustainability of publisher business models in an AI-first search environment.

Google maintains that the new pilot and tools are designed to strengthen the open web, not weaken it. The company says it will use feedback from users and partners in this initial phase to decide how widely to roll out AI-powered overviews and related news features in the coming months.