In every nook and cranny of the internet, at each and every moment of the day, you can find someone complaining that their go-to product up and changed the formula. Maybe their perfume has stronger sandalwood overtones than it used to, or their local snack shack switched up the breading on its chicken strips, or a specific pair of yoga pants absolutely did not used to be this see-through during downward dog! (Sorry, everyone.) And sometimes the product in question involves the basic nuts and bolts of the internet itself. By which I mean: Google used to be better, man.
You don’t have to take that last one from a terminally online weirdo like me. There are plenty of serious businesspeople out there, with money and key performance indicators on the line, who would agree that lately, when it comes to the internet’s biggest and most powerful search engine, the formula has definitely changed.
Like Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, who admitted on the tech news web show TBPN in May that his elite publishing house was already preparing for the worst when it came to the future of inbound traffic referrals from Google. “Last year, I told our teams: Assume there’s no search,” Lynch told the hosts. “You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.” He wasn’t alone in his proactive pessimism. Mike Reed, the CEO of USA Today, shared recently on the Rebooting Show podcast that at his company, “our plan is to assume search is gone and build our business in other ways.” Drastic times call for drastic projections, and as Reed phrased it in his interview, more than once: “The traditional Google Search model is broken.”
For the better part of the 21st century, for better and for worse, that traditional Google Search model was the engine of the internet, the cause of and solution to so many online delights and problems. Google hoovered up content, websites picked up traffic, and users got pages of search results that ranged from salient to spammy but were mostly straightforward enough to parse. In recent years, though, this status quo has been undergoing a significant change—one involving, you guessed it, artificial intelligence.
It was three years ago that the tech site The Verge got a look at some of Google’s newest LLM-driven search tools and predicted: “The AI takeover of Google Search starts now.” By May 2024, the search giant was featuring a Gemini-fueled “AI Overview” section at the top of most search result pages that sought to aggregate the entirety of, oh, all historical human knowledge into pithy (and not always accurate) bullet points.
In 2025, the company went all in on “an all-new” AI Mode. (“It’s a total reimagining of Search,” announced Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent corporation Alphabet.) And this past May, Google made the sweeping updates even more official, unveiling “the biggest upgrade to our Search box in over 25 years—now completely reimagined with AI.” Whether that was a continuation of the earlier reimagining or a reimagining thereof, I’m still not totally sure.
The results of these initiatives have been mixed. On the one hand, Google has succeeded in getting people to engage with its AI Overviews, giving users an interactive one-stop shop for the answers they seek without requiring them to open a whole bunch of browser tabs. On the other hand, if you’re a business that would have been one of those browser tabs, Google’s success is now kind of your problem. And if you’re someone like me, who once believed that the fabric of the internet would hold up forever, you might be about to find that this new material is a lot more threadbare than it once was.
“At this pace, All About Berlin will not survive into 2027,” a guy named Nicolas Bouliane, the independent proprietor of website All About Berlin, tweeted last week. Bouliane has been frank lately about the realities of his dwindling Google-driven traffic. In a blog post written earlier this year—titled “AI Is Killing All About Berlin”—he pinpointed when he felt things had gone wrong: in 2024, when Google began tinkering with its search results design, aggressively pushing AI Overviews and pushing content providers like him ever deeper down the page.
Last month, Bouliane was one of the guests on an NPR segment about the changes to Google; he told the hosts that his traffic was down 75 percent since AI Overviews was launched in 2024. Another guest, Amanda Natividad of SparkToro, offered a sobering stat (well, unless you’re a product manager at Google) about “zero-click” rates these days. “Sixty-eight percent of all U.S. Google searches end without a click,” she said—meaning that users get what they need directly in the search page (or just get distracted, I guess) without having to visit any outside sites. That’s an increase from 45 percent a decade ago. Another grim figure, per The Telegraph: While appearing first in Google search results used to mean getting a click 27 percent of the time, that number drops to 11 percent when there’s an AI Overview up top.
This summer, researchers at internet provider Cloudflare reported that “automated bot traffic has eclipsed human activity on the Internet, now generating roughly 57% of all web requests. This milestone emphasizes a seismic evolution from an Internet built for human clicks to a digital landscape now dominated by AI agents.” It’s no surprise, then, that anyone who relied on search engine inbound traffic is taking a hit, from USA Today (down half) to Business Insider (down 85 percent). We are well and truly in the predicted “Google Zero” era.
It’s also no surprise that these new numbers are altering the long-established calculus about whether outlets want to submit themselves to Google Search. Currently, Google’s offering is all-or-nothing: If you want to show up in search results, you’re also agreeing to let the company feed your content into the maw of its Gemini AI apparatus. And an increasing number of people and properties aren’t particularly interested in that arrangement.
That includes Reed’s USA Today: “We’d be crazy to sit here and just think that it’s gonna get fixed or that this traffic is gonna come to us for the next 10 years—it’s not,” Reed told Rebooting. “We’re getting close now to the point where we’ll block Google as well and abandon the traditional link, search traffic that we get.” Neil Vogel, the CEO of publisher People Inc., similarly told The Wall Street Journal: “Turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table.” (Not everyone feels this strongly: Time produces a separate, stripped-down version of its articles designed specifically for AI crawlers.)
More in Tech
Last month, after AdWeek’s Mark Stenberg reported on some of the fed-up companies that were considering withdrawing their content from Google’s indexes, he received a number of social media comments from some mom-and-pop shops of the internet. The people behind a recipe blog called Inspired Taste referred to Google’s business model as a “hostage situation,” adding: “As you already know, what Google is doing to recipes is shameful.” Another webmaster piped up to say that “we have discussed blocking Google completely so we can protect our copyrighted content from AI scraping theft. The Google traffic is so small anyway because they have nuked our website”—My Sex Toy Guide dot com, in case you’re wondering!—“from their search results.” On September 15, Cloudflare will change its settings to block Google crawlers by default.
Even Reddit—the site that everyone tells you to append to your Google searches to get quality results; the site that in 2024 inked a deal agreeing to license content to Google’s AI in exchange for $60 million—is reportedly having second thoughts about renewing the current arrangement, according to The Wall Street Journal, although no announcements have been made. (Should a new deal be struck, it would likely be a more lucrative one for Reddit.) Last week, Reddit’s quarterly earnings report included a letter from the CEO that called search engine referral traffic “choppy.”
This sort of widespread retreat from Google is by and large a new phenomenon driven by traffic changes, and it’s a dismal one. Not because I disagree with the decisions, but because it creates a downward spiral in which the experience of using Google Search gets degraded even more.
Already, going online and looking for something can be a depressing experience, filled with 404 errors and stubborn walled-garden paywalls and rotted links and shuttered publications and busted GIFs. As Brandon Wenerd, the publisher of BroBible, noted about one web-browsing experience on his Substack: “Look at this mess … SIX ad units above the fold on a Metro.Co.UK story about the All-American Rejects. You really think Google finds this UX so precious that it wants to drive people to it?”
Once upon a time, I thought nothing could be worse than the proliferation of websites driven by SEO. That was before I learned of the existence of AEO: answer engine optimization. In my day, I could get lost in the glorious SI Vault; now I can find those old gems only if I know exactly what to search for and deploy the Wayback Machine. Not all of this is specifically Google’s fault. But the company’s new priorities seem like they’ll only exacerbate the general state of dilapidation online.
I’ve been thinking lately about an unsettling line in Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s fantastical, prescient 2014 novel about a world decimated by disease. It’s not the killer virus that gave me the chills, though, or the stuff about the various breakdowns in polite society. No, what jarred me was how the internet was talked about only in the past tense.
In one scene, a young member of a roving postapocalyptic pack of strivers and survivors grumbles inwardly about the elders in his midst. “None of [them] knew much about science,” he says to himself, “which was frankly maddening, given how much time these people had to look things up on the internet before the world ended.”
Look, there’s maybe nothing less cool than waxing nostalgic about Google of all things. It’s like mourning the Astor Place Starbucks (or getting sentimental about any Blockbuster Video—although most people aren’t ready for that conversation). But I don’t think I’m really missing Google Search as much as I’m missing the days when it was mining more fertile and open ground.
Things weren’t perfect even in previous decades: A 2008 cover story in The Atlantic asked, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” while a 2010 essay by the former editor in chief of Wired concluded, “The delirious chaos of the open Web was an adolescent phase subsidized by industrial giants groping their way in a new world. Now they’re doing what industrialists do best—finding choke points. And by the looks of it, we’re loving it.” (Ah, OK then!) But like how all the best movies just so happened to come out when I was a tween, and all the best music just so happened to drop when I was in college, the best search engine was the one that was there for me in my early-20s day job era, when it sometimes felt like I could travel to the very ends of the internet and back and it would be like that forever.
If you’ve googled anything lately (sorry, searched anything up, as the/my kids say), you may see that things are different now. Maybe you’ve looked up how to poach egg on your phone and had to sift through AI Overviews and video shorts and a bunch of suggested searches (“egg poacher” and “how to poach an egg in an egg poacher” being two of them) just to get to what anyone actually wants/needs: a nice, simple blue-text link to the GOAT, Smitten Kitchen. Maybe you’ve wondered how those autofill suggestions in Gmail can be so omnipresent, so thirsty, while Gmail’s search function operates like a can’t-be-bothered nepo hire forever in the midst of quiet quitting. Possibly you’ve tried looking up an exact headline you 100 percent remember seeing and have been gaslit by Google, which suggests that you must be mistaken. And probably you’ve been jump-scared by an agent of the future, some confident yet servile chatbot eager to synthesize the World Wide Web for you, answer any follow-up questions you may have, and make sure you’re as comfy as humanly possible—so that you’ll have no reason to try getting up and clicking around anywhere else.
Across most of this 21st century, googling something has meant issuing a command and receiving a timely answer. But lately, it’s felt like initiating a conversation with a time-share salesman. I’m old enough to remember when using a search engine was like ordering a sandwich at an efficient, no-fuss deli! Now it’s more like being trapped in one of those novelty restaurants where everyone smirks and insists: We do things a little differently around here!
There’s another part of Station Eleven where a character daydreams about going online, as one does. “All the information in the world is on the internet,” she writes, “and the internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.” I love that description: It contains the internet of my memories and also the internet in today’s reality. The one blooming with life, and the one that triggers all my allergies.
Back in 2000, four years before Google’s IPO, cofounder Larry Page mused in an interview that “artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google.” In his vision, “It would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing.” Google Search as we thought we knew it feels broken, now that they’ve gone and changed the formula. But maybe all this time it’s been rounding into its final form, just as the elders foresaw.
