Pichai says AI is growing queries and Google is sending more traffic. But critics accuse Google of content theft and sending less traffic.

A judge asked the U.S. Department of Justice on Friday how much room there would be for new search engines to emerge given the rise of artificial intelligence, as antitrust enforcers press for Alphabet's Google to take dramatic measures to restore competition in online search.

For now, AI Mode is just an option inside of Google Search. But that might not last. At its I/O developer conference on May 20th, Google announced that it is rolling AI Mode out t