An estimated 68% of internet activity starts on search engines and about 90% of searches happen on Google. If the internet is a garden, Google is the Sun that lets the flowers grow.
This arrangement held strong for decades, but a seemingly minor change has some convinced that the system is crumbling. You’ll soon see a new AI tool on Google Search. You may find it very useful. But if critics’ predictions come true, it will also have seismic consequences for the internet. They paint a picture where quality information could grow scarcer online and large numbers of people might lose their jobs. Optimists say instead this could improve the web’s business model and expand opportunities to find great content. But, for better or worse, your digital experiences may never be the same again.
On 20 May 2025, Google’s chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company’s annual developer conference. It’s been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you’ve probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. “For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode,” he said. “It’s a total reimagining of Search.”
You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal.
People use Google Search five trillion times a year – it defines the shape of the internet. AI Mode is a radical departure. Unlike AI Overviews, AI Mode replaces traditional search results altogether. Instead, a chatbot effectively creates a miniature article to answer your question. As you read this, AI Mode is rolling out to users in the US, appearing as a button on the search engine and the company’s app. It’s optional for now, but Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, said it plainly when launching the tool: “This is the future of Google Search.”
Fuck google and the walled web. Time to help people join the fediverse.
To be honest, most of the internet is dead anyway.
The good stuff is here in the Fediverse and there are a few havens out there where people can come together.
If Google destroys the Internet, the furry community will just have to rise up and make Internet 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Nothing is “an apocalypse” for anything.
JFC, people, stop pushing these extreme opinions on AI. It is not simultaneously the solution to everything and the end of the world. It’s just a goddamn tool.
I think the argument in this context it’s more about how Google is acting as a company, and less about how the underlying technology is dangerous.
Like Google clearly intends to turn off the web traffic to anyone who isn’t them. They want to maximize the amount of time users are spending on their page, seeing ads served directly by them. With their ad monopoly liable to get broken up in court, they won’t be able to monopolize advertising on other websites, so they’re just going to prevent people from going to other websites.
The fall out for smaller websites, news, blogs, ect, will be that suddenly a lot of their traffic is going to disappear because Google is no longer sending people to them, instead Google will scrape their pages and then just give that information directly to users.
Is there truly an audience for “I don’t want any proof, just answer my question”?
As Elon said, let that sink in. Perhaps an unpopular position, but if that’s all users want and it makes them more money, of course that’s what Google will do.
I’m in no way suggesting this is a good direction, but it’s unsurprising.
Today a friend told me about how, last night, a Google AI summary led to a huge fight between him and his partner. Turns out the AI summary was 100% wrong. I mean yeah, don’t make important decisions based on an AI summary. But a lot of non-tech folks still have no idea how inaccurate those results can be, and even more just plain don’t care.
Yeah, I’d say that audience is most people, sadly
Anti-intellectualism is he law of the land
Search engines are already basically worthless, so I’m not surprised with the falling axe.
The shift from search engines actually indexing things to search through to trying to parse a question and find an answer has been the most irritating trend for me. I remember when you could just put in a series of words and be delivered unto every indexed page that had all of them.
Now I regularly get told that even common words don’t exist if I insist that, no, google I do want only searches with the words I put in.
This is my old person rant, I guess. /s
This change is probably going to cause huge problems for a lot of existing sites, especially because it means Google will probably start changing their advertising model now that they can consolidate the views into a specific location and pocket the money. The article mentions this, but doesn’t realize the implications.
“The internet will still be around,” is only true if you hold that the super consolidated, commericalized nexus of doom is going to continue on just fine, while countless small, very useful websites made by actual people for actual reasons fade away into oblivion.
It sucks to watch something I have loved my whole life die, but it’s going bit by bit because we can’t convince our politicians to do anything about it.
I think Google is doing this specifically because of the anti trust trial against their ad monopoly/monopsony.
Like they’re clearly loosing the trial and that means they’re probably going to have to sell off parts of their advertising company, or at least massively alter how they operate to end the anti competitive practices.
It used to be that Google made money on every user, even if they left the site, because they served all the ads on every other site as well. Now that they won’t be making money that way, so they don’t want people going to other sites anymore.
Isn’t this site proof that the internet doesn’t have to die as a whole? I mean, I agree with your sentiment, but I feel that this will mostly hit the middle to high traffic sites. The community based ones with organic discovery will remain OK I think. This might even evolve back to an early internet age of smaller hobbyist sites because there no longer is big money in the internet (apart from what google captures as “their” internet)
Can someone please break this company up into pieces?
Why the fuck people still use Google? Seriously? Is it just lazyness and old habit of defaulting to Google or is it just “whatever is the default in browser” which is Google in 99% of times?
I’ve been on DuckDuckGo and recently Qwant for at least 8+ years now and I don’t miss Google one single bit.
I have used Presearch for years, decentralized search engine, powered by blockchain technology.
Yeah! I used DDG for quite a while and it’s pretty okay. Kagi definitely isn’t without fault but for me it’s the best true alternative to Google and I happily pay for it. Allows me to save so much time (cumulatively) by just guiding me to the actual result in most cases (instead of sponsored and ad-infested garbage sites)
I’ve been using DDG for a bit, and honestly, it’s kinda garbage. They are just borrowing data from Bing, and it shows.
Add Stract.com it is a little behind in web crawling of current info, but the results are like how google used to be around 2010. Just relevant content info, no ads (yet) and occasional randomness
With any luck, it will kill google.
I don’t see how they can even pretend that it will do anything other than steal website traffic, since the exact point is to provide you with the information you would have gotten if you had gone to the website, leaving no reason to actually go to the website.
So painfully obviously, Google intends to steal the websites’ content in order to steal the websites’ traffic.
Which would seem to me to be grounds for class action lawsuits on behalf of the entire internet, which, if judged fairly, should bankrupt even that foul beast of a corporation.
And ironically enough, that would almost certainly “rejuvenate the internet.” As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a single thing that would do more to “rejuvenate the internet” than killing Google.
Google has been floundering since chatgpt came online. Their press releases all sound the same to me. “We haven’t had real competition for so long that we got complacent, and now we’re not really sure what to do”
I agree with the above but would like to add that the results are hilariously bad and error-prone. I got results for a simple query about public holidays that were so wrong it was unusable. Once people get to experience the abysmal AI search regularly, they will just stop using it. Whether Google quietly kills it quick enough before people start using alternatives is the billion dollar question.
Everyone knows that there are 88 bank holidays a year, starting with Chreaster on Octember 41st.
As hyperbolic as this title sounds… This will basically make Google into even more of a monopolistic power than it has been. It’s the zero-click web: you Google a question, you read the Google AI result, then you remain on Google.
For the average boomer with a computer, this is basically 50% of the internet. The other 50% is Facebook and maybe ESPN. The most popular computers run like molasses, chugging at every click. And any website that doesn’t fit within this tightly walled garden has either been choked out of existence or is so laden with advertisements that it forces the average user to run back to the relatively comfortable walled garden.
(I’m summarizing that last paragraph - using what’s left of my human Intelligence - from a section of a much better Ed Zitron article.
