Updated Google SGE to include relevant website information directly in responses and to expand to Japan and India

If you’re lucky enough to have access to Google Search Labs, you’ll notice from now on that the AI ​​generative search tool looks a little different. As of Thursday, Search Generative Experience, or SGE for short, now includes reference links directly in the AI-generated response.

Previously, if you wanted to know where SGE got its sources from, you had to click on a small icon in the upper-right corner that displayed corroborating pages for each of SGE’s claims. Now SGE’s replies are right on the page with arrow icons pointing down where the information came from. “During testing, we found that it’s easier and more understandable for people to show access to these links in the dashboard itself,” the blog post announcement reads.

SGE can only be accessed via a waitlist and only within Google’s proving ground, Labs, which makes evaluation difficult – a product’s experimental status gives it the chance to have obvious problems even when it’s heavily used. But those who had Early Access noticed SGEs, let’s say: liberal borrowing of content (sometimes verbatim) from human-authored articles without explicit citation.

According to Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management of search, Google has already gained insights: “People want to see both the content and the sources that are driving the content.” It’s unclear what kind of feedback SGE receives from publishers, but Budaraju said, “We’re prioritizing approaches that will continue to drive traffic to the web, right? Because we think it’s important to the health of the web.”

Also, as has been said over and over again, SGE is just an experiment. It remains to be seen what the final product will look like in the end. But for now, the updated SGE interface in Search Labs definitely assigns sources more clearly than before

If you have access to Search Labs and are based in the US, you can expect to see the changes today.

Starting today, Google is also expanding access to Search Labs outside of the United States. The first two countries that can test SGE are Japan and India. You will have the original version of SGE with the updated UI in the coming weeks.