Published by NewsPR Today | July 2025
You know the feeling. You find the perfect search result, click the link, and hit a wall of text. The answer you need is buried somewhere in there, but finding it feels like a chore.
Google has a radical fix in the works for that exact problem. A new, experimental feature called “Ask for me” aims to parachute a personal AI assistant directly onto any webpage, effectively reading it for you. Instead of you hunting for the information, the AI finds it and just tells you the answer.
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Here’s how it works: on some search results for complex topics, a new button may appear. Click it, and a Google chat box opens up right on top of the website you’ve just landed on. It comes pre-loaded with your original question, ready to scan the page’s content and give you a direct response.
Google’s “Ask for Me” AI: A Threat to Publisher Websites?
For a user, the appeal is obvious—it’s the ultimate shortcut. But for the millions of people who actually create the content on those websites, the feature is setting off alarm bells.
The core of the issue is control. Publishers design their sites to guide visitors, using layouts and links to create an experience and, crucially, to pay the bills through ads, products, or subscriptions. This “Ask for me” feature threatens to bulldoze right past all of that. It can vacuum up the valuable information and serve it to the user in a Google-branded box, leaving the publisher with nothing.
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The fear is that a user gets the answer and leaves. The ads go unseen. The affiliate links go unclicked. The creator’s work is used but not supported.
This test is a glimpse into a future where Google’s AI acts as a universal middleman between you and the web. While that may be convenient, it raises an existential question for creators: What happens when your website becomes just another data source for Google’s AI to harvest?
This experiment, first brought to light by Search Engine Roundtable, puts the central conflict of the modern web on full display: the raw tension between ultimate user convenience and the survival of the creators who make the web worth searching in the first place.
