Let’s start with Google rolling out AI-powered features in its flagship search app.AI Overviews, which began rolling out in May 2024, provide an AI-generated summary of search results at the top of Google search pages, andAI Mode, introduced in May 2025, is an alternative search interface built around conversations with Google’s Gemini chatbot.

These features have led to a dramatic drop in web traffic, with some sites reportedlylosing 30% to 40% of their Google-driven visits in 2024 and 2025. That kind of traffic drop is a site killer, whether you’re a publisher seeking readers or a retailer selling widgets.

Now, Liz Reid, a VP and head of Search at Google, will tell you that’s nonsense, that “overall traffic to sites is relatively stable.” Further, she claims, the new and improved AI Google is “sending slightly more quality clicks to websites.” And Nick Fox, Google’s Senior VP of Knowledge, recently said, “from our point of view,the web is thriving.”

Similarweb, which measures traffic to over 100 million web domains, estimates a 5% decline in worldwide traffic from search engines from June 2024 to June 2025, The Economistreported, with certain types of sites, such as science, education, and health sites, taking a harder traffic hit.

AndDigital Content Next, a trade association of content companies, whose members include The New York Times, Condé Nast, and Vox, found that referraltraffic dropped by as much as 25% in May and June alone.

Some sites are seeing far sharper declines. Neil Vogel, head ofPeople Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), which publishes People, Travel + Leisure, Investopedia, and many other publications, told The Economist that before AI came along, more than 60% of its traffic came from Google. Today, it’s in the mid-30s and dropping fast. Vogel accuses Google of “stealing our content to compete with us.”

What does that mean? Digital marketer Azhar Ahmedexplained on Reddit, “AI Overviews push actual links down the page. AI Mode barely includes them at all.” So “instead of sending you to websites, Google now encourages follow-up prompts inside its own tools.” This means fewer clicks and less traffic for content sites. By cannibalizing the web’s content and repacking it as Google answers, Google is starving the open web.

APew Research Center study of 900 US Google users agreed with those thoughts.  According to its results, when people saw an AI overview, just 1% clicked on links in the summaries. 

Now, at this point, you might be tempted to say, “How can Google do this? Isn’t it cutting its own throat? Don’t all its billions come from ads that will increasingly decline in value?”

Google knows exactly what it’s doing. The company is putting advertisers’ ads within or adjacent to AI Overviews. Google CEO Sundar Pichaiexplained to The Verge, “If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.” Being on the first page of search results doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all about being in the AI summaries.

And guess where those links lead you? When people do click through, “almost 30% of all clicks go to platforms Google owns” such as YouTube, Google Images, Google Flights, and more, according to aJuly 2024 report from market research company SparkToro. The trend of Google sending people back to Google sites has been increasing rapidly;it was only 12% in 2019. And all this growth, I must add, was before Google went whole-hog into AI search. It can only be a lot worse now.

Google is doubling down on this approach. When you search with Google on Chrome, do you go togoogle.com? Of course not! You put the search term in what Google calls the omnibox but we know as the address bar. Well, soon our searches there will befed into Google AI Mode. Oh sure, Google says that’s not the default now. Want to bet how long until it does become the default? I’d say by Q2 2026.

Oh, and guess what? While Google may continue to say all’s fine and dandy with the old “open” web, it tells a different story when its feet are held to the fire of a trial. In acourt document Google filed for itsantitrust trial about the open-web digital advertising market, the company claims, “The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.” So, please, please, Judge Brinkema, don’t hurt our ad monopoly, since “the last thing a court should do is intervene to reshape an industry that is already in the midst of being reshaped by market forces.”

Google says market forces, I say their misuse of AI.

So where does the web go now? First, there areefforts afoot to muzzle the AI searchbots that Google and the other AI powers rely on to vacuum down content. Cloudflare, for example, nowoffers a bot-blocking service to deter AI crawlers. Cloudflare is also exploring a way tomake AI companies pay to access sites’ data. Similar efforts from companies such asTollBit, a paywall for bots, andProRata are seeking to force AI companies to pay for access to your content.

Governments like the European Union and the United Kingdom are also taking notice and action. The EU and UK areboth considering taking Google to court for the effect its AI is having on companies.

Other companies are considering changing their business model away from search, in what’s being called “Google Zero.” That means using newsletters and apps to reach customers, rather than relying on the web. For the content that remains on the web, it will be behind paywalls to prevent it from falling into AI’s hands. Mind you, it will also keep that information out ofour hands.

All that means the end of the open web. Before the internet became what it is today, a lot of worthwhile content was scattered hither and yon on proprietary online services such as AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. To get to those, you had to pay high subscription fees. There were no connections between them. There was no open web. Indeed, there was no web.

That’s precisely where I fear we’re going. It’s not a future I want to see.