The open internet might be dead, and Google might have killed it.
Last week my coworker sent me a TechCrunch article about how Google Search, at least as we’ve known it for the past 25 years, is over. At the most recent Google I/O conference, Google announced an “intelligent search box” that, for an increasing number of inquiries, will use AI to generate not just responses but entire UX/UI modules. Gone will be the classic ten blue links, although they’ve been so buried under sponsored results and LLM summaries for the past decade that, in all practicality, they’ve been suffocated already.
The implications for the internet as a whole seem pretty dire. Google spent ages suppressing other indexing sites, absorbing parallel entities and paying companies like Apple $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine in Safari browsers. The result was Google Search becoming the gatekeeper for most internet traffic. And in short order, they will be closing those gates, demolishing the digital roads we’ve built over this past half a century, and using the scrapped asphalt to build their own giant cul-de-sac.
People are talking about this in apocalyptic terms, and I tend to agree. This is an internet where the world’s most dominant search engine no longer does what a search engine does, which is link out to other sites. Instead, it siphons data—and with that data, value—from all of us who make content on the internet. And I mean all of us, everyone from influencers and journalists and artists, to senior marketing staff at Fortune 500 companies. We all become serfs toiling in the fields that, whether we like it or not, our liege lord Google will reap for themselves—with no guarantee they will share in the harvest.
The age of the “clickless” search is upon us. Unless internet users claim greater agency over what search engines they use, the act of building, maintaining, and supplying content for a site will just be stocking a warehouse for which Google is the only vendor.
Ironically, if we indulge this avarice from Google, it will destroy the incentive to create on the internet in general. The less traffic going to our websites, the less content we’ll likely create for those sites, and the less food the hungry maw of Google will have to feed on.
The open internet might die. But if it does, it might just take Google with it.