Google Moves Forward With AI Only Search Results

The next shoe is beginning to drop for independent websites as Google moved forward with AI only search results.

Independent websites have been put on notice. If you depend on Google search results for traffic and your livelihood, your days may be numbered. All of this thanks to Google’s AI Overview.

In May of last year, I raised the alarm over AI Overview. While other AI out there has been the subject of moral panic, there is little doubt that AI Overview is an exception to this. The threat is very much real.

In short, AI Overview appears on the top of search results for a number of search queries. What it does is summarize content that exists on the open internet, then offers up said summary to the user afterwards directly on the search results. This as opposed to looking up information that exists from across the internet and bringing users search results for what they are looking for. Below those results are ads and below that are actual web search results.

For Google, the goal is quite clear: to reduce the number of clicks away from its search engine and keep users on their site while punishing the very websites that provide said content in the first place by reducing traffic to their websites. This allows Google to hoard the traffic and revenue for themselves and effectively screw over the independent website owners and creators in the process.

Like so many of our other accurate stories and warnings, these warnings largely went unnoticed for most news organizations. How could a change in Google’s search algorithm possibly affect them anyway when they are among the top landing pages for certain kinds of content? Must be just a silly little nothingburger.

Well, it turned out to be a heck of a lot more than a simple nothingburger. As the weeks and months progressed, publishers began noticing a pretty significant decline in traffic. For us, the decline meant that we went from around 250-400 views per day to a paltry 50-75 views per day since the change took place. Little was said from others outside of the tech realm, but the affects were already happening with websites all over the internet suddenly shedding huge amounts of traffic and revenue.

What’s worse, Google was reportedly testing AI Overview only results, meaning that when you type a search query, you won’t even be getting any third party links at all. Just an AI response pushing answers Google thinks is correct (spoiler alert: a number of answers are decidedly not good). So, what little traffic you, as an independent website might get despite the AI Overview popping up above your results would get wiped out completely, shuffled off into a completely different tab and hidden away from the public.

Earlier this year, Cloudflare investigated the matter to determine if web traffic is getting killed off by Google’s AI Overview. Their findings were stark. 75% of search queries get answered without users leaving the search engines website. 58.5% of user clicks don’t even leave the search giants webpage thanks to AI Overview. As a result, independent websites are seeing their traffic get absolutely gutted – just like what we’ve seen on our end of things. It’s part of an overall trend Cloudflare dubbed the “zero click” internet.

Not long after, a European complaint was lodged against Google claiming anti-trust activities. The good news is that the complaint is much stronger than the feeble copyright complaints that are doomed to fail in the courts. Google is clearly harming independent websites in the process of implementing more enshittification for its users.

While things did grow quiet for a while after all that hit, it seems that things are getting noisy on the front of Google putting its proverbial boot on the necks of independent websites. Yesterday, while conducting research for yesterdays article, Google put the following notification on my search:

For those who can’t see the image, it says “AI Mode” in a gradient of green to yellow to red text.

Below it, the text reads “New! Try AI Mode”

Below that, the smaller text reads “Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses”

Below that is two white buttons with blue text.  The left reads “Not interested” while the right says “Continue”.

Now, I did the ethical thing to do and clicked “not interested” so I can continue to get what little use I can out of Google still, but I did dig up their advertised page to find out if this is, indeed, AI only results. Judging by the animated demonstrations, this is, indeed, the AI only search results that are the thing of nightmares for web developers. The AI supposedly “scans” multiple pages, then gives you its AI response afterwards. No traditional web results to be found.

According to Search Engine Land, this is all part of a trial rollout across 180 countries two weeks ago:

Google is rolling out AI Mode in 180 countries and territories after recently expanding AI Mode in the UK, India and of course, the US.

Google announced:

“Starting today, we’re bringing more advanced agentic and personalized capabilities to AI Mode so you can make progress on your tasks and get more tailored information based on your interests. We’re also bringing AI Mode to even more people around the world.”

So, as it turns out, I got randomly selected to test drive their AI only results when I received that pop-up (again, something I declined for ethical reasons).

Thanks to ongoing litigation and a decline in overall web traffic, Google has been taking a lot of flack for fleecing websites of their traffic. So, to counter this, they are pretending to care and say that they are trying to offer more visible links for the users in their AI results. From ZDNet:

According to an X thread from Robby Stein, VP of product for Google Search, Google is tinkering with methods to display more links in AI Mode search queries, and he explained the new link displays that users may encounter.

Stein’s X thread comes three weeks after Liz Reid, VP and head of Google Search, wrote a blog post explaining that Google Search traffic trends have remained unchanged by AI Overviews, a separate AI Google Search tool.

Meanwhile, a July report from the Pew Research Center found people “very rarely” clicked on the links cited in AI summaries. The news also comes at a time when publishers are attributing a steep drop in traffic to the rise of AI summaries, which they fear disincentivize people from clicking through to their websites.

Stein said that users are more likely to click links that are embedded within AI Mode responses when they want more information. He said link carousels are available in AI Mode on desktop and will be available on mobile soon, without a specific timeframe.

According to Stein, Google is preparing model updates to improve the placement of hyperlinks to websites within AI Mode text responses. He said Google trains the model to understand where and when users are most likely to want to dig deeper into a query, and the long-term goal is to embed more links within an AI response.

Here’s the problem with this: Google is essentially picking winners and losers over who gets the leftover scraps of traffic. If Google thinks it has found a better and different source, then your link will not get displayed. This as opposed to traditional search which displays all relevant results based on what Google thinks is relevant to search. If a user is not satisfied with the initial results, they can keep scrolling. That is not the case with AI result which displays a handful of links it found and disregards the rest. So, if a Freezenet link falls outside of the top dozen or so links, then it basically gets banned from results completely. This as per how links are “displayed” (re: requires multiple clicks to get through) on AI Overview.

The implication here is obvious. The smaller websites go completely invisible for the users and the larger websites see a massively reduced presence for the users. The only way to even have any visibility at all (outside of paying Google directly for advertising of course) is to present material that can best feed Google’s AI machine and you might get a few dozen clicks afterwards. For larger websites, this will be nowhere near enough to sustain them as they’ll receive a fraction of the traffic they once get. Eventually, a number of even the larger sites would face a die off because it’s very VERY hard to replace Google as a top tier source of traffic. Yes, web results will be available in a separate tab (for now), but that is still going to result in a severe decline of web traffic anyway.

How many websites will actually survive this massive hit? It’s hard to say. Still, we are marching towards an existential threat here. Information will become more homogeneous and inaccurate, fewer people will be able to independently verify and fact-check, and businesses will end up suffering massively. The worst part about all of this is the fact that there is not a damned thing we can do about this.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.