At a conference ahead of Google I/O 2026, I watched the company unveil a list of AI-enabled features aimed at solving pain points across its software ecosystem.
One tool promises to significantly improve the quality of video searches: Ask YouTube, as it’s called, scans the platform’s catalog of long and short form videos to reveal content related to complex queries.
At first glance, that sounds like a win for both viewers and YouTube creators. Ask YouTube, however, takes it a step further — directing searchers to a video that answers their questions and zeroes in on the appropriate timestamp. Log in, get your answer, log out.
But if people don’t stay to watch the whole video, or at least most of it, this threatens the way video creators make money and build a following. YouTubers need a large subscriber base, which leads to more ad revenue, sponsorships, affiliate links and fan support.
In other words, Google’s pursuit of ease-of-use may be directly reimbursing the creators who power its platform. Goodbye, ad revenue. Long term, community building.
What Google’s Ask YouTube feature will look like.
Google made a similar move when it launched AI Overview in late 2024, ranking readers above publishers who had long relied on traffic from the search engine results page. By extracting information from media sites and summarizing it at the top of search results, AI Overview reduces clicks on other websites by 58%, according to a February report by marketing and research firm Ahrefs. (Google claimed that “links included in AI Overview receive more clicks than if the page had appeared as a general web listing for that query.”)
In the opening minutes of last year’s Google I/O 2025 keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai boasted that AI Overviews — a feature that can be turned off and on automatically — has more than 1.5 billion monthly users. On the sidelines of today’s Google I/O 2026 keynote, Photosi wrote a blog post noting that the feature has grown to more than 2.5 billion monthly users.
Google’s AI overview referral traffic cannibalization appears to be a predictive model for video platforms. The Ask YouTube feature, as explained, will guide you when you answer their question in the video, after which you may have a little incentive to stay. Viewers likely won’t understand the channel’s theme and vibe, and won’t stay tuned to engage with its charm or storytelling.
Google’s “solution” is to curate creators’ content to provide YouTube viewers with answers. In effect, it would replace YouTubers’ revenue streams in favor of their data and creativity, potentially undermining their entire business model.
Ask YouTube comes first for YouTube Premium subscribers, but the company plans to take it to the rest of the world at some point.
Searching the code for answers in an instant — instead of finding the right YouTube video
Google unveiled endless AI features during its I/O keynote, but some are more subtle in its efforts to transform content creators’ income. Search has incredible integration capabilities, including leveraging Gemini 3.5 Flash’s new AI capabilities to code simple, fast software on the fly. For example, in a basic application, it can create a wedding or travel planning widget that displays relevant information and deadlines in a browser window.
But this so-called agent code has another use case that Google showed in the forum. Say you’ve asked a question about a particular aspect of astrophysics, such as black holes — to answer, Gemini 3.5 Flash can create an interactive virtual simulation to show how the detailed concept works. Google calls it “productivity UI.”
An example of “agent code” that creates a physics simulation of black holes within the search results.
I would hope that more people who want to understand black holes would turn to reputable publications with a high level of space and science journalism. But honestly, I would expect more people to head to YouTube to see a complex concept of astrophysics broken down visually in a well-produced video. Why would they bother if Gemini 3.5 Flash does simulation directly from search results?
There are many uncertainties, especially regarding the quality and accuracy of the simulated responses produced by the new Gemini model. However, even if they are sometimes inaccurate, their usefulness seems to outweigh their reliability.
Despite the AI Overview telling people to eat rocks in 2024 and giving other misinformation, people are still using it instead of turning the page. AI startup Oumi, cited by the New York Times, estimates that AI Overview using the new Gemini 3 model was accurate 91% of the time. A number of healthcare organizations and charities have told The Guardian that the AI Overview has given incorrect recommendations for screening for pancreatic cancer, liver disease and other serious health conditions.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the new explosion of AI in Search leads to fewer people looking for answers in videos. Search can’t replace streamers (yet), but every category of YouTube content — explainers, how-tos and best practices — could see a drop in traffic if viewers don’t skip their AI-generated search results. And they will be missed by all the curious, weird, wild people who make videos to share with the world.
As AI overviews reduce clicks outside of Google’s ecosystem, YouTube’s chat AI and Google’s productive search simulations threaten to slow down video content production. And that creates a paradox: If creators stop making educational content due to lack of traffic and compensation, AI models won’t have the data sets they need to generate future answers.
Ultimately, Google built its “simplicity” empire on the backs of uncompensated creators.
