There’s a small, easy-to-miss moment when you realize that something familiar has changed in a quiet way. When you type a question into Google, you get a polished paragraph of text answer before you even see a link. Don’t click. Do not browse. Just a reply. It makes things easier. It also feels like something is over.
That something is what has been powering the internet in the background for almost 30 years. Search engines are able to crawl websites and read their content. In return, those engines send people to them. That’s the deal. Ads bring in money, and thousands of publications, review sites, small blogs, and other independent parts of the web depend on ad revenue to stay open. It’s not very exciting, but it’s worked.
Sundar Pichai announced Google’s new AI Mode at the company’s developer conference in May 2025. It looks like that could all change. AI Mode doesn’t just list links next to summaries like the AI Overviews that have been at the top of search results for about a year. It mostly takes the place of the links. When you ask, AI gives you an answer, and the reasons to visit a website slowly fade away. Liz Reid, who is in charge of Search at Google, said at the launch, “This is the future of Google Search.” That’s not language used in sales. Reading it makes me think of a verdict.
It’s not a guess that publishers and SEO experts are worried. BrightEdge data shows that AI Overviews have increased site impressions by almost half across the web, but clicks have decreased by about 30%. People can see the links, but they don’t click on them. Gisele Navarro, managing editor of HouseFresh, a site that reviews products for better air quality, said, “Google is showing our links more often, but no one clicks.” Something almost Kafkaesque about that—being seen by everyone but no one else—is interesting.
Barry Adams, the founder of the SEO company Polemic Digital, uses the word “decimation” instead of “extinction,” which sounds like a mild word until you think about what it means. In a best-case scenario, he thinks AI Mode could send about half as many clicks to the web as regular search. That’s not just a rough quarter for a small publisher with low profit margins; it’s the end of their business model. It’s possible for some sites to stay in business by becoming niche, building direct audiences, or moving to social media and newsletters. But there is a version of this where the open web, which is a huge, imperfect library of human knowledge and debate, slowly starts to empty out.
For its part, Google fights back. The business says that AI Overviews and AI Mode send people to more websites, and the traffic they get is better quality because the people who visit are more interested. Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice president of knowledge and information, said in a recent podcast that, if you take out spam, web content has grown by 45 percent in the last two years. “From our point of view, the web is thriving,” he said. Google hasn’t released any data to back up these claims, which doesn’t exactly make the doubters go away.
It’s harder to ignore where this is all going in the long run. Recently, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind said that some publishers might eventually send content directly to AI systems instead of putting it on websites for people to read. The “machine web” of the future is a place where computers, not people, read and understand large amounts of information. Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said it best: “Robots don’t click on ads.” That’s what’s strange and unsettling about that change.
Besides the economics, this is also a loss of culture that needs to be mentioned. People could find something unexpected on the open web, even though it was very chaotic. For example, they could find a niche forum, an obsessive blogger’s deep dive, or a small publication covering a story that no one else thought to cover. That kind of serendipity doesn’t happen all the time in a world where answers are summed up. There’s still no word on whether most users will miss that or just like getting answers faster and move on. It’s possible that both are true.
It looks more and more likely that the current chapter of the internet is coming to an end. The arrangement that held it together is breaking down. We don’t yet know if the new thing that’s coming together is a real improvement or just a calmer, more algorithmic place to get information. But it’s hard not to notice that the flowers are still growing while people fight over who owns the sun.
