The End of Google Search—and the Internet—as We Know It
For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links. Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.
There’s a lot of truth and a lot to think about here. Google, at least from the standpoint of what it’s historically been and what most people would like it to continue to be, is dying. It’s dying, and intentionally or not, it’s determined to take the rest of the internet down with it.
As someone who has kept this here little website chugging along for almost 23 years now, I’ve had a lot of reasons to consider this lately. Since the beginning, we’ve primarily relied on two things. People coming directly here, and people looking up random crap and finding their way to us. There have been ups and downs of course, but those two things have always been constants. Even when people started spending more time on social media and less time deliberately visiting their favourite sites, there were always plenty of folks Googling stuff. but the last couple years? It’s been rough, man. And it doesn’t matter who you are. Whether you’re us who does this mostly because it’s fun and we like keeping it around or the largest of publishing outfits with hundreds or thousands of livelihoods depending on you, you’re feeling it. That flood of search traffic you used to get is a trickle now if it’s anything at all, and the results are crushing.
And the worst part, to my mind anyhow, is that all of this ultimately benefits no one. Yes, in the short-term Google wins somewhat because it can keep all the money for itself, but what happens when there’s no more hosts off of whom to leech? When you take away the incentive for people to create and those people either stop creating entirely or find ways to work around you and cut you out of the deal, what does the AI do then? AI can’t do anything for itself. Everything it knows is based on what humans have given it, willingly or otherwise. So beyond a certain point, there’s nothing left. If that day comes, what’s the product? I fear where things are headed, but I also have to hope that we’ll never find out.
“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. We are well and truly in the predicted “Google Zero” era.