TECH

Google’s ‘AI wall’ that could put the open internet at risk

Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has overhauled its search function with AI. It launched AI Mode, which replaces search results containing hyperlinks with conversational answers written by Gemini, its AI chatbot. More recently, Google also altered its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years, allowing people to add photos and videos to their queries and designate AI “agents” to conduct searches on their behalf.

Users are typing queries three times longer than the keyword-laden questions used in traditional searches, Google stated at its developer conference in May. People are spending between one and nine minutes longer in AI Mode than in traditional Google searches, according to three studies by researchers compiled by *The New York Times*. An October study by Growth Memo, a newsletter focused on search and marketing, found that in about 75% of sessions, users never left AI Mode to visit the open web.

For publishers, businesses, banks, and others that relied on Google to drive its billions of users to their sites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company increasingly integrates AI into search. Google users are no longer leaving the platform after a search, opting instead to read AI-generated answers; this means fewer people are visiting their sites, and search traffic has dropped.

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the tech site *The Verge*, has been warning publishers for years that they would face “Google Zero”—a moment when traffic originating from Google would plummet to zero.

“For media companies, Google Zero is already here,” he said. “It was only with the arrival of AI Mode that people realized this slow evolution was about to reach a tipping point.”

These changes threaten the open web and demonstrate how rapidly AI has transformed the technological landscape. Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, envisioned the web as a tool for borderless global collaboration, where people could launch their own sites and navigate freely between sites created by others.

Much of that vision has eroded over the years as tech giants like Apple and Meta created "walled gardens"—technological ecosystems where users could get almost everything they needed in one place. Now, AI has arguably accelerated this trajectory, Berners-Lee stated in a 2024 essay.

Tech companies have built empires that lock in users and focus on maximizing profit rather than enhancing public utility, Berners-Lee wrote. "The rapid advance of AI has exacerbated these concerns," he added, "demonstrating that issues on the web are not isolated but deeply intertwined with emerging technologies."

Google has denied putting the open web at risk. In a blog post last August, Liz Reid, vice president of Search, stated that the company’s philosophy had not changed and that it was generating a "relatively stable" number of clicks—in the billions. Reports of a decline in search traffic were "inaccurate" and based on "flawed methodologies," she said.

"We care deeply—perhaps more than any other company—about the health of the web ecosystem," Reid said.

Since that blog post was published, Google has integrated more artificial intelligence (AI) into Search. The company has also created features designed to steer users away from "AI mode" and toward the broader web, including website previews in some responses and a tool that allows people to set "preferred sources," ensuring the AI ​​consults their favorite news outlets more frequently. The company also created a feature that helps media companies and content creators promote their work in search results.

“Google’s AI-powered search features generate billions of clicks to the web each week, meeting people’s evolving preferences for how they want to find information, while also driving significant traffic to websites,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company’s AI features highlight links to the web.

Even so, searches are increasingly being performed by AI chatbots, while the number of people visiting websites is falling, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company. Whereas someone might previously have Googled a soccer player's World Cup performance and clicked on a sports site or a social media discussion to read commentary, a bot now scours the web for that information and presents the player's statistics to the user, who remains on Google.

In total, more than 50% of web traffic is now non-human, Cloudflare stated. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to company websites in sectors such as finance, publishing, and retail dropped by nearly 40%, the company added.

The web's fundamental economic model has shifted, Cloudflare stated, and chatbot-style search tools—such as Google's—could put the open web at risk if left unchecked.

Google's AI, along with other popular chatbots, has impacted Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the online encyclopedia, reported an 8% decline in human visitors to its site over the past year. At the same time, there has been an increase in bots scraping data from the site to train AI models.

“My job is to ensure people don't forget us because Google's user interface has changed,” said Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia has begun promoting its own app and social media channels to build connections with readers outside the Google ecosystem, she said. The organization has also started charging Google and other AI companies for access to its data for training purposes.

Last month, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority ordered Google to modify its AI-based search tools in the UK to address concerns raised by media companies. The regulator ruled that Google must include clear links attributing content authorship in chatbot responses—a measure designed to help drive traffic to websites. The company is also required to allow website operators to opt out of having their content displayed in AI-generated summaries, and it is implementing these changes to its search function globally.

For some advocates of the open web, the fact that people can leave Google’s ecosystem is enough.

“Whether using a traditional search method or AI, I think Google is still facilitating access to the open internet,” said Tori Noble, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties online. “It’s not a closed universe” compared to walled gardens like Facebook, which requires a login for access, she added. This offers little consolation to some website operators.

In May, Vox Media—owner of *The Verge* and other publications—began selling off some of its sites. Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s CEO, said the “decimation of search traffic” influenced his decision to sell about half the company to James Murdoch. In June, *The Verge* and several other Vox Media sites were sold to Penske Media.

Google often claims it is “sending more traffic and that the web is bigger than ever,” Patel said. “And, right alongside that, there are a lot of content producers whose businesses are being destroyed.”

mundophone