Google Chrome will summarize entire articles for you with built-in generative AI

Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you’re reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you’ve actually clicked a link.

You probably won’t see this feature, which Google is calling “SGE while browsing,” right away.

Image: Google

Google says it’s a new feature that’s starting to roll out Tuesday as “an early experiment” in its opt-in Search Labs program. (You’ll get access to it if you already opted in to SGE, but if you haven’t, you can opt in to the feature on its own.) It will be available first in the Google app on Android and iOS, and the company is bringing it to the Chrome browser on desktop “in the days ahead.”

If you do have access in the Google app on mobile, Google will pull up a set of AI-generated “key points” from an article after you tap an icon at the bottom of the screen. The feature is designed to work “only on articles that are freely available to the public on the web”; Google says it won’t work with websites that publishers mark as paywalled.

Google is making a handful of other improvements to SGE, too. On the SGE results for a search query about topics like science, economics, and history, Google says you’ll be able to hover over certain words to get definitions or diagrams about a topic. Google is also making it easier to understand SGE’s summaries of coding information.

Google announced SGE at Google I/O in May and has been improving it in the months since. I don’t like it, but Google is pleased with its progress. In the company’s latest earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that user feedback “has been very positive so far” and that “over time this will just be how Search works.”