The integration of AI Overviews into search engines enhances user experience but diverts traffic from content creators, potentially discouraging high-quality content creation and causing user attrition that undermines long-term search engine profit. To address this issue, we propose a game-theoretic model of creator competition with costly effort, characterize equilibrium behavior, and design two incentive mechanisms: a citation mechanism that references sources within an AI Overview, and a compensation mechanism that offers monetary rewards to creators. For both cases, we provide structural insights and near-optimal profit-maximizing mechanisms. Evaluations on real click data show that although AI Overviews harm long-term search engine profit, interventions based on our proposed mechanisms can increase long-term profit across a range of realistic scenarios, pointing toward a more sustainable trajectory for AI-enhanced search ecosystems.

翻译：将AI概览功能整合到搜索引擎中虽能提升用户体验，却会分流内容创作者的流量，可能抑制高质量内容的创作，并导致用户流失，从而损害搜索引擎的长期利润。为解决此问题，我们提出了一个包含成本投入的创作者竞争博弈论模型，刻画了均衡行为，并设计了两种激励机制：一种是在AI概览中引用来源的引证机制，另一种是向创作者提供金钱奖励的补偿机制。针对这两种情况，我们提供了结构性见解及接近最优的利润最大化机制设计。基于真实点击数据的评估表明，尽管AI概览会损害搜索引擎的长期利润，但依据我们提出的机制进行干预，能够在多种现实场景中提升长期利润，为AI增强的搜索生态系统指明了更具可持续性的发展路径。