Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
AI Is Killing Internet – Publishing and the Website — and How Google Is Killing the Search Engine
Google built the road to the internet, then became the tollbooth, then became the destination. Now the snake is eating its own tail — starving the very websites that fed it. --YNOT!
Once upon a time, Google was the front door to the internet.
You had a question. You typed it into Google. Google gave you a list of websites. You clicked one. Maybe it was a newspaper. Maybe it was a blog. Maybe it was a small business, a doctor, a mechanic, a teacher, a gardener, a product tester, or some strange genius in a basement who knew more about air purifiers than the people selling them.
That was the bargain.
The website made the knowledge. Google helped you find it.
The website got the visitor. Google sold the ad.
Everybody ate.
But now Google has decided it does not want to be the road sign anymore.
It wants to be the road. It wants to be the destination.
It wants to be the librarian, the book, the author, the cashier, and the security guard standing at the door making sure nobody leaves.
That is the real story.
AI is killing internet publishing because it is taking the work of websites, summarizing it, repackaging it, and answering the question before the reader ever visits the original source.
And Google is killing the search engine because Google Search is no longer really search.
Search means: “Here are the places where you can find the answer.”
Google is becoming: “Here is the answer. Stay here. Don’t click. Don’t leave. Don’t visit the people who did the work.”
That is not a search engine. That is an answer engine built on other people’s work.
Google’s AI Overviews officially began rolling out to U.S. users in May 2024, with Google saying it expected to bring them to more than a billion people by the end of that year. (blog.google) Google later pushed even deeper into AI search with AI Mode, bringing Gemini into Search and turning search into a conversational AI system rather than a simple list of links. (blog.google)
And once that happens, the website becomes a ghost town.
The New Ghost Towns
The internet is starting to feel empty because, in many ways, it is being emptied.
Not empty of pages. There are more pages than ever. Empty of people.
A website can still exist. It can still have articles, recipes, reviews, essays, research, photos, and years of human effort. But if Google stops sending people there, that website is like a store in the desert with the lights on and nobody driving by.
That is what “zero-click search” means. A person searches. Google gives them enough of an answer. The person never clicks. The website gets nothing.
Recent analysis found that in 2024, 78.5% of U.S. Google searches and 69.7% of European Google searches ended with zero clicks. In plain English, most Google searches did not send the user to the open web at all. Think about that.
For every 1,000 searches, only a minority become visits to outside websites. The rest stay inside the Google machine, bounce to another Google search, go to Google-owned properties, or die right there on the page.
That is not a doorway anymore. That is a trap door.
And behind those percentages are real people.
Small independent websites are seeing there traffic tumble. Most have lost 95% of their Google traffic after that updates, while broad, generic pages from big media brands and Google Shopping-style results rose above it because they are paid for.
That is the new internet economy.
Do the work. Test the product. Help the public. Lose the traffic.
Watch a bigger brand or an AI box take the attention.
This is how a website dies now.
Not with a lawsuit. Not with a shutdown notice. Not with a hacker attack.
It dies because the road that used to bring people to its door has been rerouted around it.
Code Red at Google
For twenty years, Google owned the habit of asking questions.
“Google it” became part of the English language.
Then ChatGPT arrived.
Suddenly, people did not need ten blue links. They could ask a question in normal language and get a direct answer. No digging. No opening tabs. No reading five articles. No comparing sources. Just the answer.
That changed everything. Google’s money machine was built on the click. You searched. Google showed ads. Then it sent you somewhere else.
That sounds simple, but it was one of the greatest businesses in history.
Google did not build most of the internet. Other people did. Google organized it and sold ads beside the path. It was a tollbooth on a road built by writers, publishers, businesses, journalists, hobbyists, experts, and fools. Some of the fools were useful too.
But ChatGPT threatened the whole tollbooth. If people ask ChatGPT instead of Google, Google loses the search habit.
So Google faced the innovator’s dilemma: to survive, it had to become the thing that threatened it.
To beat the chatbot, Google had to become a chatbot.
But the moment Google becomes a chatbot, it breaks the old bargain with the web.
Because the old Google needed you to click. The new Google needs you to stay.
The Window Shopper
The AI Overview is the perfect weapon against the website.
You ask: “How do I get red wine out of carpet?”
Google gives you the steps right there.
You do not visit the cleaning blog. You do not see the ads.
You do not sign up for the newsletter. You do not buy the author’s book.
You do not support the person who wrote the answer.
You got the answer. The source got a footnote.
Pew Research Center studied nearly 68,879 Google searches from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result only 8% of the time. When no AI summary appeared, they clicked nearly twice as often, 15% of the time. Users clicked links inside the AI summary only 1% of the time. (Pew Research Center)
That is the whole scam in one statistic. Google can say, “But we cite our sources.”
Yes, and a thief can leave a thank-you note.
A citation is not a visit. A footnote is not income. A source link nobody clicks is not compensation. A website cannot pay writers, editors, testers, photographers, servers, lawyers, insurance, hosting, and taxes with “visibility.”
People die of exposure. Websites do too.
Pew also found that when an AI summary appeared, users were more likely to end the browsing session entirely: 26% with AI summaries versus 16% with normal search results. (Pew Research Center)
That means AI does not just reduce the click.
It ends curiosity. The machine says: “You know enough.” And the reader believes it.
The Great Purge
Google says its updates reward helpful content. That sounds nice.
Every monopoly speaks in kindergarten language.
Helpful. Safe. Quality. Trust. Experience.
But then the real world shows up.
Small expert sites get buried. Forums rise. Reddit posts rise. Quora answers rise. Big publishers with generic affiliate pages rise. Anonymous comments sometimes outrank people who have spent years studying a subject.
The result is not always better information.
It is information that is easier for the machine to process, easier to summarize, easier to rank, easier to monetize, or easier to defend politically.
A real expert is complicated. A Reddit thread is simple.
A doctor may explain uncertainty. A stranger on a forum gives confidence.
And confidence, in the internet age, often beats knowledge.
That is how you get a web where the person who tested the product disappears, while the person who commented about it floats to the top.
This is not a small change. In internet publishing, ranking is payroll. Traffic is oxygen. A search result is not just a search result. It is the difference between hiring a writer and firing one. It is the difference between publishing another investigation and shutting the site down.
The Reddit Enclosure
Then there is Reddit. In 2024, Reddit made a content licensing deal with Google reportedly worth about $60 million per year, allowing Google to use Reddit content for AI training. (Reuters)
That deal matters because Reddit is now one of the most valuable piles of human conversation on the internet. It is messy. It is funny. It is wrong. It is useful. It is vulgar. It is real. And AI companies want real human language because AI-generated language feeding on AI-generated language becomes a photocopy of a photocopy.
So Google pays Reddit.
OpenAI also entered the search race directly. ChatGPT Search launched with timely answers and links to web sources, meaning ChatGPT is no longer just a chatbot; it is also a search replacement for many users. (OpenAI)
Now stop and notice the new class system.
Big platforms can sell their data.
Reddit can sell to Google.
Publishers can negotiate licensing deals.
Apple can decide which AI lives inside Siri.
Microsoft can put Copilot in Windows, Bing, Edge, and Office.
Google can put Gemini inside Search.
But what about the small website?
What about the local blogger?
The independent reviewer?
The niche historian?
The recipe writer?
The gardener?
The mechanic?
The Cuban political analyst?
The small newspaper?
The person who actually knows something but does not have a billion-dollar legal department?
They get scraped, summarized, outranked, and forgotten.
That is not an open web. That is digital feudalism.
The peasants grow the crops. The lords collect the rent. The king calls it innovation.
The $2 Billion Extinction Event
Publishing is not magic. It is math. If a website loses traffic, it loses ad revenue.
If it loses ad revenue, it cuts writers. If it cuts writers, it publishes less.
If it publishes less, there is less original information.
If there is less original information, AI has less human knowledge to summarize.
Then AI starts feeding on old articles, recycled summaries, SEO sludge, forum guesses, and other AI-generated mush.
That is the dead internet spiral.
Estimates are that Google’s generative search could cost publishers as much as $2 billion annually in ad revenue, and later reporting noted concerns that the estimate might be too low. (Adweek) (Digiday)
That is not a rounding error. That is enough money to wipe out newsrooms, niche sites, local reporting, review sites, and independent publishers.
The cruel part is that the cost of producing truth does not go down.
A real investigation still takes months.
A product test still requires buying the product.
A journalist still has to travel.
A lawyer still has to review sensitive reporting.
A photographer still has to show up.
A good editor still has to know the difference between a fact and a rumor.
AI does not remove those costs. It removes the revenue that paid for them. That is the trick. The machine eats the fruit and then wonders why the tree is dying.
The AI Race — Google, Microsoft, Apple, and ChatGPT
This is bigger than Google. This is a race to control the new front door to human knowledge.
Google has Search, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Maps, Gmail, and the ad machine.
Microsoft has Bing, Edge, Windows, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and its deep partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft launched an AI-powered Bing and Edge in February 2023, calling it a “copilot for the web,” then expanded Copilot across its products. (The Official Microsoft Blog) (The Official Microsoft Blog)
OpenAI has ChatGPT, which changed the public habit of asking questions. With ChatGPT Search, OpenAI moved directly into Google’s territory: fast, timely answers with links, inside a conversational interface. (OpenAI)
Apple is the quiet giant in this race because Apple controls the device in your hand. Apple integrated ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, including Siri and Writing Tools. (Apple) Reuters also reported that Apple has explored AI-powered search options in Safari, including providers like OpenAI and Perplexity, which threatens Google because Google has long depended on being the default search engine inside Apple’s ecosystem. (Reuters)
That is the war. Not search results. Default behavior.
Who answers the question first? Because whoever answers first controls the user.
Google wants the answer to happen on Google.
Microsoft wants the answer inside Windows, Bing, Edge, and Office.
OpenAI wants the answer inside ChatGPT.
Apple wants the answer inside Siri, Safari, and the iPhone.
And the website? The website is the poor mule pulling the cart while four rich men argue over who owns the road.
The Machine Monopoly
This would be dangerous even if Google were small. But Google is not small.
In August 2024, a U.S. District Court ruled that Google was a monopolist and acted as one to maintain its monopoly, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The Justice Department later described the ruling that way in its remedies announcement. (Department of Justice)
That matters because when a normal company changes its product, customers can go elsewhere.
When Google changes search, whole industries move.
One algorithm update can destroy a business. One AI box can erase a million clicks.
One ranking change can decide whether a local publisher hires or fires.
And now the same company accused of illegally maintaining search monopoly power is turning search into an AI answer system that keeps more users on its own page.
That is not just product design. That is control over attention.
And attention is the currency of the internet.
The Internet Death Spiral
Here is the paradox. AI needs human-created content.
But AI search reduces traffic to human-created content.
When traffic falls, publishers die. When publishers die, less human-created content exists.
Then AI has to train on the leftovers: old articles, scraped summaries, Reddit guesses, AI slop, recycled misinformation, and the digital dust of a once-living web.
That is how the internet becomes a hall of mirrors.
A machine reads a summary of a summary of a summary and then hands it to you with the confidence of Moses coming down the mountain.
But there is no mountain. Only a server farm.
The open web worked because anyone could publish.
A small shop could be found because it was useful.
A writer could build an audience because he was honest.
A strange expert could explain some little corner of the world better than any institution. That was the miracle.
Now the miracle is being enclosed.
Curiosity is being centralized. Knowledge is being summarized.
Traffic is being captured. The source is being starved.
The machine is learning from the people it is replacing.
And they call it progress.
The Real AI Question
The question is not whether AI is useful. AI is useful.
The question is whether AI is being built in a way that destroys the people and websites that make useful knowledge possible.
A hammer is useful. But if a man uses it to break into your house, you do not praise the hammer.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, and OpenAI are all racing to become the new interface between mankind and information. That race may produce amazing tools.
But it may also kill the open web. Because the internet cannot survive as a museum of unpaid sources. If websites do the work and AI takes the answer, the website dies.
If the website dies, the knowledge pipeline dies. If the knowledge pipeline dies, AI becomes a well with no rain.
That is the warning.
Google may win the search race.
Microsoft may win the office worker.
Apple may win the device.
ChatGPT may win the conversation.
But the public may lose the web. And one day we may wake up and realize the search engine did not die because it failed.
It died because it succeeded too well. It found everything.
Then it swallowed everything. And when it finished swallowing the internet, it looked around and asked:
