Google, love it, like it, or hate it (or just live with it), dominates the search space. It’s not even close. Google is also Big Tech’s Big Tech, with parent Alphabet clocking in at a market cap of 3.89 trillion, ahead of Apple ($3.81 trillion), Microsoft ($2.85 trillion), and Amazon ($2.58 trillion). NVIDIA is the king of the hill at $ 4.6 trillion, but Google still owns search.
Everyone measures by it for ads, ranking, web traffic- you name it- even though the web traffic side is scored for ad space, not actual visits. Yes, I still have a beef with them about that. Anyway, Google dominance has made it the beast to please, but Google’s latest update is less about value for you and more about value for Google.
The centerpiece is a new AI-powered Search box running Gemini 3.5 Flash. It expands as you type, accepts text, images, files, videos, even Chrome tabs as input, and spits back AI-generated answers where the blue links used to be. Google also unveiled “Search Agents,” AI systems that monitor blogs, news sites, and social platforms around the clock to proactively ping you when something matching your criteria happens. There are agentic booking features and custom AI-generated interfaces that build dashboards instead of sending you to actual websites.
It’s seamless. It’s free. And the traffic to the websites that actually created the information?
They don’t get the click traffic; no hits, Google sucks it all up.
Only 8% of AI overview results produce clicks to the source website, and over 58% of all Google searches now produce zero website clicks. According to reports, where ad revenue used to be split 50/50, Google is now vacuuming up 90% of it.
The very reason for appeasing Google has died at Google’s hands.
I’ll be frank. I’ve not gone out of my way to appeal to Google’s search engines, but requesting indexing from Google is still the gold standard for search, but for how much longer?
The loss of traffic and revenue this can cause is not minor or even middling. Reports suggest that once successful websites are likely to cease to exist because the Google Kraken has sucked all the hit traffic out of the virtual universe.
This, I suspect, will lead to more lawsuits, not specifically against AI but against its use for purposes such as this, to enrich one of the top tech companies on the planet, which has no reason to stop unless advertisers stop using it.
Frankly, I’d be more than happy to smile loudly if something awful happened to Google. And this goes beyond surface-level objection to intellectual property rights claims.
I can accept that AI, having read the views of others widely, could produce a synopsis of its own, just as anyone who is well-read or “listened” in the age of podcasts might create original content based on all that input.
As long as it cites sources and properly quotes them, we’re not exactly in alien territory. Most blogs do the very same thing. Replacing them at the top of search results that by design discourage people from actually clicking through to the source material is something altogether different.
Google Search isn’t supposed to be the website landing page providing the answers. It is a resource that provides results for people to sift through. I suppose I should not be surprised. Google has, for many years, gone from being an unbiased retriever to a partisan attack dog. Using its AI to streamline the chicanery seems like little more than the next logical step in your global brainwashing operation.
If you aren’t going to be unbiased, what point is there to expecting people to choose the curated partisan content? Just give it to them in the search box, put it above the actual results, and let human nature do the rest.
We used to worry about Google’s effect on elections. Now we can ponder the slant-impact on everything. Google as god-king of the internet, but with a twist. This new configuration is going to kill the websites Google relies on for these results. Its premeditated partisan bias will systematically defund and destroy the thing it feeds on, brainwashing its users.
At some point, Google’s AI will just have to use the wealth of left-Wing bullshit it has peddled for years to make up answers with no citable source. What else can it do? After it has strangled all the traffic, and hence the revenue necessary to sustain them, Google’s AI would have to assume the role of progressive everything.
I know, every website would be affected, but you have to wonder if Google didn’t just outthink itself. If you wanted left-wing thought to rule, you’d use this to strangle all the other websites, but then you’d have to regurgitate pro-liberty and individual rights responses to relevant surveys, and the woke assholes at Google would never do that.
There are, by the way, lots of other search engines these days, including ones other than the partners. They say they are not Google, but they use Google search.
Go find some and use them.
