The Internet’s Editor: Google AI ‘Experiment’ Rewrites Publishers’ Headlines on News Articles

Google has begun testing a new feature in its search engine that rewrites the headlines of published news articles using AI, prompting sharp criticism from media executives who say the company is overstepping its role as a distributor of content.

ADWEEK reports that the experiment, which Google has described as limited in scope, builds on the foundation of AI Overviews, a feature that already summarizes publishers’ content into brief snippets displayed in search results. The new strategy goes a step further by altering the editorial content itself, changing the headlines that publishers have crafted for their own articles. For many in the news industry, this represents a significant escalation in what has been an increasingly tense relationship between Google and the outlets whose content powers much of its search ecosystem.

Under the traditional platform relationship, publishers produced content, Google used it to surface answers to user queries, and outlets