One of Google’s top executives defended its use of AI summaries in search results during an AI summit in New York on Monday.

When asked about a new lawsuit by Rolling Stone’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation, over Google’s AI Overviews, the company’s vice president of government affairs and public policy Markham Erickson said user preferences are shifting away from “factual answers” provided by original websites to the contextual summaries provided by AI Overviews, which appear at the top of the main page of search results. The company’s goal, Erickson said, is to maintain a “healthy ecosystem” with both AI summaries and regular search results, sometimes referred to as 10 blue links.

Evidence has emerged recently that suggests that search traffic plummets with AI summaries. In it

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