How Google’s AI Search Threatens the Open Web
When Google was about to go public in 2004, Larry Page, the company’s co-founder, wrote letter to shareholders describing the internet company’s responsibility to the world.
“We believe that a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr Page said.
Google fulfilled this responsibility by acting as a gateway to the Internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks and pushed users to what’s known as the “open web”—the millions of Web sites run by merchants, publishers, universities, and others—for more information. In the decades that followed, Google became one of the richest and most powerful companies on the planet as it directed people into the vastness of the open web.
Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be retreating from the open web — and may be threatening it.
Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with AI, introducing an AI mode that replaces hyperlinked search results with conversational responses written by Gemini, its AI chatbot. Recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years to allow people to add photos and videos to their queries and assign AI “agents” to search for them.
The effect of these moves is increasingly clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever before.
Users are writing queries three times as long as the keyword queries they asked in traditional search, Google said at its developer conference in May. According to three studies by researchers counted by The New York Times, people spend one to nine minutes longer in AI mode than they do in traditional Google searches. One October study from Growth Memosearch and marketing newsletter, found that in about 75 percent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web.
For publishers, businesses, banks and others who have relied on Google to drive billions of users to their sites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company increasingly incorporates artificial intelligence into search. Google users no longer leave Google after searching and only read its AI-generated answers, which means fewer people are coming to their website and search traffic has dropped.
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of technology website The Verge, has been warning publishers for years that they will face “Google Zero,” which is when traffic from Google drops to zero.
“There’s already Google Zero for publishers,” he said. “It wasn’t until the AI mode came that people saw that the slow creep was approaching a tipping point.”
The changes threaten the open web and show how quickly artificial intelligence has changed the technology landscape. Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989, envisioned the Web as a tool for global collaboration without borders, where people could run their own websites and freely navigate between sites created by others.
Much of that vision has been eroded over the years as tech giants like Apple and Meta created “walled gardens,” or tech ecosystems, where users could get almost everything they needed under one roof. Now AI has undeniably accelerated that trajectory, Mr. Berners-Lee said in 2024 essay.
Tech companies have built empires that have locked in users and focused on maximizing profits instead of increasing the public good, Mr. Berners-Lee wrote. “The rapid advancement of AI has exacerbated these concerns,” he added, “demonstrating that problems on the web are not isolated, but rather deeply intertwined with emerging technologies.
Google has denied that it threatens the open web. In a blog post last August, Liz Reid, vice president of search, said the company’s ethos had not changed and that it was posting “relatively stable” clicks in the billions. Reports of a decline in search traffic were “inaccurate” and relied on “flawed methodologies,” she said.
“We care deeply—perhaps more than any other company—about the health of the web ecosystem,” Ms. Reid said.
Since this blog post was published, Google has added more artificial intelligence to search. It has also created some features to push users out of AI mode and into the wider web, including website previews for some reactions and a tool that allows people to set “preferred sources” to get the AI to link to their favorite news outlets more often. The company also created a profile to help publishers and creators promote their work in search.
“Google’s AI Search features send billions of clicks to the web every week, meeting people’s evolving preferences for how they want to find information while driving significant traffic to websites,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company’s AI features highlight links on the web.
Yet searches are increasingly being done by AI chatbots while the number of people visiting websites is declining, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery company. While someone might once Google a soccer player’s World Cup performance and click on a sports page or social media thread to comment, now a bot searches the web for that information and returns the player’s stats to the user, who stays on Google.
Overall, more than 50 percent of web traffic is now inhumane, said Cloudflare. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to business websites in industries such as finance, publishing and retail fell by almost 40 percent, she added.
The basic economic model of the web has changed, Cloudflare said, and chatbot-style search engines like Google could threaten the open web if left unchecked.
Google’s AI along with other popular chatbots hit Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia, said it had seen an 8 percent drop in human visitors to its site over the past year. At the same time, it has seen an increase in the number of bots searching its website for data to train artificial intelligence models.
“My job is to make sure people don’t forget about us because Google’s user interface has changed,” said Selena Deckelmann, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikipedia began promoting its own app and social media channels to connect with readers outside the Google ecosystem, she said. Google and other AI companies have also started charging for access to its data for training purposes.
Last month, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority ordered it Google change its AI search tools in the UK to address publisher concerns. The regulator said Google must include clear attribution links in chatbot responses, a move to help drive traffic to websites. The company is also required to allow website operators to opt out of having their content appear in AI summaries, and is making changes to search globally.
For some advocates of the open web, the fact that people can leave the Google ecosystem is enough.
“Whether it uses a traditional search method or AI, I think Google is still making it easier to access the open Internet,” said Tori Noble, staff representative at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties online. “It’s not a closed universe” compared to walled gardens like Facebook, which requires logging in for access, she added.
This is of little consolation to some website operators.
In May, Vox Media, which owns The Verge and other publications, began selling some of its sites. Jim Bankoff, CEO of Vox Media, said the “decimation of search traffic” influenced his decision to sell about half of the company to James Murdoch. In June, The Verge and several other Vox Media sites were sold to Penske Media.
Google often said it was “sending more traffic and the web is bigger than ever,” Mr. Patel said. “And then right next to that is a group of publishers whose businesses are being destroyed.
Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.