Saturday Links: AI Chip Shops, The Changing Web, Ray-ban Display Glasses

In a week with eVtols getting the green light for testing, AI coming to parliament, AI-enabled chip shops, and Gemini 2.5 abstract problem solving, there is a lot to talk about. Here are the top five items:

• Penske, Publisher of Rolling Stone, Files Lawsuit Against Google Over AI Summaries. The core of the complaint from Penske is that the way Google indexing works bundles web crawling that indexes their site for inclusion in search ranking together with permission to use it in model training and in AI summaries (part of Google search results on many topics). As a result, they are forced to choose between being demoted in search results and feeding AI summaries, which they believe divert attention away from their articles. This is a clear sign that publishers are feeling the pain of changing user and search engine behaviour. It is hard to predict how the lawsuit will turn out, but my guess is that at some point, Google will voluntarily allow publishers to set search engine indexing and AI crawling separately in order to avoid complaints like this. This probably won't help Penske much, however, since AI summaries are increasingly what users read and use. Not appearing in them will likely be even worse than appearing.
• Research finds a 62% overlap between Google rankings and ChatGPT answers, showing SEO success doesn’t ensure visibility in AI results [Original Study]. This new study looks at how likely it is that high-ranking results from Google searches correlated with likely mentions in ChatGPT answers. The conclusion that there is not much correlation is not that surprising. The searches are very different, and OpenAI likely uses its own indexes (potentially even more similar to what exa.ai does, rather than keyword search.). Correlation may be higher in other studies as well, but what is clear is that as product and content search moves to AI chatbot interfaces, businesses face the ranking challenge all over again. Penske might end up less worried about AI overviews than the AI chatbot trend as a whole.
• Google Announces AP2: Powering AI commerce with the new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). This week, the Google Cloud team announced an extension to their A2A (Agent to Agent) communication protocol that supports payments. This is a logical need for a future web where many interactions will be non-human. An impressive array of partners is listed in the announcement, though my guess is that it will be quite some time before we see much take-up. Interactions like this are highly strategic, and many industry players will be jockeying for position to gain advantage.
• Meta announces first Ray-Ban smart glasses with built-in augmented reality display. Meta is moving fast in the wearables space and announced a number of new Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses products. I still love my generation one Meta Ray-Bans, and the new devices look great. The neural-band controller on the new display glasses looks like a significant breakthrough in user interaction capabilities, and at $799, the device is expensive, but not insanely so. Still, I'm not wild about having an Instagram feed in my eyeline. I'm more tempted by the sports-focused glasses with no display. The investment here suggests to me, though, that Meta sees real first-mover advantage in flooding the zone with devices. Apple is behind here, but can probably catch up. It's Google that might need to be worried; can it ensure Android's place in the personal device space if the paradigm changes?
• Meta's new small reasoning model shows industry shift toward tiny AI for enterprise applications. More tiny AI from Meta. Small models are gaining steam. Interestingly, the licensing this time is non-commercial only; perhaps this is part of the advantage Meta wants to hold for smart glasses?

Wishing you a good weekend wherever you are!