Google will launch Discover on desktop this coming days. However, this rollout comes with a catch for digital media outlets. It’s a survival kit for the coming apocalypse.
On Google’s roadmap, whenever it thinks about launching a new feature within any of its surfaces , the same bell always rings.
The big G makes a silent announcement at some sector event, or leaks the move to the specialist press, to then make it official, little by little, through deployments or tests in secondary markets to create buzz .
What we do know, therefore, is that Discover will be making the jump from mobile to desktop in the coming days, coinciding with the Google I/O event on May 20 and 21, where this and other new features will be made official by Sundar Pichai’s team.
Before all this, the sequence happened like this.
Eric Barbera , News Product Planning and Go-to-Market, Google, made the revelation during the Search Central Live Madrid 2025 event on May 9.
The topic wasn’t mentioned, but the slide showing the idea was left hanging for a while. Shortly after, Spanish SEO managers took notice, and the silent announcement spread worldwide.
Discover on desktop is now rolling out in the US and New Zealand.
Right now, Discover on desktop is being seen intermittently in the browsers of users’ laptops and computers in the United States, but permanently in countries like New Zealand, the latter mentioned by Matthias Thier and Braian Iván Quiña, and the former confirmed by ReddePeriodistas.com from American media sources.
Thus, next week we’ll see how this new Discover feature will be officially announced at the annual Google I/O 2025 event, where ALPHABET officially unveils all of the year’s new features for all of its properties, from Google to YouTube.
Google launches Discover on desktop to compensate publishers for the collapse that comes with AI Overviews and AI Mode
This announcement, however, will come with a catch.
Recent reports from various SEO tools these days—and in the coming days—foreshadow a rather bleak future for attracting organic traffic from Mountain View’s search engine results.
AI Overviews is cannibalizing the entire audience that used to come from the traditional blue links of the old Google. And what’s coming isn’t looking like it’s going to get any better—quite the opposite.
In markets where Google’s generative summaries are more highly trained, such as the United States, some media outlets are already reporting a loss of half of their web traffic to this new Google.
Gartner has already predicted a 50% drop in Google traffic.
This aspect was already predicted by the consulting firm Gartner several months ago, whose data indicated a 50% collapse in digital audiences by 2028, a percentage that is accurate but has already been anticipated, as we are already seeing in certain countries.
Thus, Google knows it won’t be able to keep the media against it in this pivot toward AI-first. Even more so when it activates AI Mode as the default interaction model in its search engine. Something it will presumably do at the I/O developer event on May 20.
That’s the trick. It will give you Discover digital press on desktop, but it will activate its own ChatGPT on searches so users don’t have to click, but instead chat with this new Google that’s coming.
Let’s remember that AI Overviews is one thing, and AI Mode is another, even more worrying one. Overviews provide direct answers to internet users’ queries, with collateral links—much like Perplexity or ChatGPT do.
However, AI Mode is an option for the user to interact with questions and answers as if it were a chatbot.
Google will stop being a link search engine and will become ChatGPT
Thus, ALPHABET’s search engine will cease to be a link indexing engine and will end up being what the rest of its competitors in the AI business are: a generative search engine with which you converse, not from which you reach a link (click).
When both Google AI modules, with Gemini under the hood, are deployed right there, the residual traffic now coming from AI Overviews won’t seem like much, despite the drops compared to last year.
In return, Google is giving the news sector a new toy, which is none other than Discover in the desktop version , so that the media understand that everything will come through Discover, because SEO in Google Search will be more about visibility than traffic.
More than anything, because AI Overviews is swallowing up all the informational searches, those embedded in the editorial core of the mass media.
Yes, as a digital platform, Google (Search) will start to look more like a social network, like TikTok or Instagram, which you have to be on but which doesn’t generate referral traffic.
Google Discover would thus evolve from the primary channel for press audiences to what is now presumed to be a survival channel.
