Is Google about to destroy the web?
Google says a new AI tool on its search engine will rejuvenate the internet. Others predict an apocalypse for websites. One thing is clear: the current chapter of online history is careening towards its end. Welcome to the "machine web".
The web is built on a simple bargain – websites let search engines like Google slurp up their content, free of charge, and Google Search sends people to websites in exchange, where they buy things and look at adverts. That's how most sites make money.
An estimated 68% of internet activity starts on search engines and about 90% of searches happen on Google. If the internet is a garden, Google is the Sun that lets the flowers grow.
This arrangement held strong for decades, but a seemingly minor change has some convinced that the system is crumbling. You'll soon see a new AI tool on Google Search. You may find it very useful. But if critics' predictions come true, it will also have seismic consequences for the internet. They paint a picture where quality information could grow scarcer online and large numbers of people might lose their jobs. Optimists say instead this could improve the web's business model and expand opportunities to find great content. But, for better or worse, your digital experiences may never be the same again.
On 20 May 2025, Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai walked on stage at the company's annual developer conference. It's been a year since the launch of AI Overviews, the AI-generated responses you've probably seen at the top of Google Search results. Now, Pichai said, Google is going further. "For those who want an end-to-end AI Search experience, we are introducing an all-new AI Mode," he said. "It's a total reimagining of Search."
You might be sceptical after years of AI hype, but this, for once, is the real deal.
People use Google Search five trillion times a year – it defines the shape of the internet. AI Mode is a radical departure. Unlike AI Overviews, AI Mode replaces traditional search results altogether. Instead, a chatbot effectively creates a miniature article to answer your question. As you read this, AI Mode is rolling out to users in the US, appearing as a button on the search engine and the company's app. It's optional for now, but Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, said it plainly when launching the tool: "This is the future of Google Search."
Here's the problem critics foresee – AI Overviews already sends much less traffic to the rest of the internet, and many fear AI Mode could supercharge that trend. If this comes to pass, it could crush the business model that's fuelled the digital content you've enjoyed for almost 30 years.
"If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current form, it's going to have a devastating impact on the internet," says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at the marketing agency Amsive. "It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivise content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more. Google holds all the power."
Google says these concerns are overblown. In fact, the company believes AI Mode will make the web healthier and more useful.
"Every day, we send billions of clicks to websites, and connecting people to the web continues to be a priority," a Google spokesperson says. "New experiences like AI Overviews and AI Mode enhance Search and expand the types of questions people can ask, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered."
But Google and its critics agree on one thing: the internet is about to look very, very different. The next year or so will likely mark the end of an era online. The only question is what our world will look like when the dust settles.
The publisher's lament
It's important to note that the internet isn't going anywhere. Social media platforms are doing better than ever. Some popular sites with paywalls are thriving. What is about to change is how people find and discover information online. It's the "open web" that some fear is at risk – the ecosystem of freely accessible independent websites, where people and businesses, often called "publishers", share information, images and video.
We've heard this before, however. A Wired magazine cover declared "The web is dead" in 2010, yet here we are. Smartphones, apps and social media have all sparked doomsday predictions about the World Wide Web. But following Google's announcement in May, the BBC spoke to over a dozen experts who say AI Mode poses an unprecedented threat to the digital economy.
"I think 'extinction' is too strong of a word for what's going to happen to websites," says Barry Adams, founder of the SEO firm Polemic Digital. "'Decimation' is the right word."
Google disagrees. In fact, the company tells the BBC that AI Overviews have been good for the web, and AI Mode will be no different. Google insists these features send users to "a greater diversity of websites" and the traffic is "higher quality" because people spend more time on the links they click.
However, the company hasn't provided data to back up these claims. Google has an AI guide for curious publishers, but it hasn't give websites a clear picture of how AI Overviews affect them. Google did not respond to questions on this point. And what Google doesn't deny, at least not outright, is that these AI tools reduce the total amount traffic that Search sends out to the web.
Critics say it's simple – AI Overviews and AI Mode both include links to sources, but if AI gives you the answer you're looking for, why would you bother to click?
Data seems to support that logic. (Don't believe me? Ask Google's AI.) Numerous analyses have found that AI Overviews appear to cut the amount of traffic Google sends to websites – known as the "click-through rate" – by between 30% and 70%, depending on what people are searching for. Analyses have also found that some 60% of Google searches are now "zero-click", ending without the user visiting a single link.
Experts believe that some version of AI Mode will soon become the default, and that would supercharge the effects AI has on traffic because it completely does away with the traditional list of links.
"I expect that the amount of clicks that go from Google's AI Mode to the web will be about half, and that's in the optimistic scenario," says Adams. "I think a lot of users will just be happy with what the AI gives them. It could be the difference between having a viable publishing business and going bankrupt. For a lot of publishers, it will be that dramatic."
This isn't just about a bunch of bloggers losing their jobs. It will also change how users themselves interact with the web and how they find information.
"The web is all these communities at the tip of your fingers and that could disappear," says Gisele Navarro, managing editor of HouseFresh, a site that reviews air quality products. Navarro is an advocate for websites that feel sidelined by Google and she argues the sources of information users are able to find could become far less diverse. "It's like asking a librarian for book, but they just tell you about the book instead," she says. "This feeling of the web being a big library for all of us, I think that is gone."
A Google spokesperson says predictions and analyses like these are unsound. The company says sites can lose traffic for a variety of reasons, and studies addressing these issues often use skewed data and flawed methodology.
"From our point of view, the web is thriving," Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of knowledge and information, said on a recent podcast. "There's probably no company that cares more about the health and the future of the web than Google." In fact, Fox said the amount of content on the web has grown by 45% in the last two years, and that's excluding spam. "We see this in the data," he said. "People are still very actively clicking through to the web."
Despite those reassurances, some websites are struggling with the arrival of AI-powered chatbots and search.
Last year, HouseFresh was one of countless small online businesses that said it was hit by updates to Google's algorithms that often rerouted traffic to big-name brands. Now, Navarro says, AI is compounding the damage.
"A few weeks ago, we noticed a spike," Navarro says. Impressions, the number of times HouseFresh appears on Google Search, are trending upwards. "But at the same time, clicks are trending down. So Google is showing our links more often, but no one clicks. It correlates with AI Overviews."
According to the data analysis firm BrightEdge, AI Overviews have caused impressions to rise 49% across the web, but clicks have fallen 30% because people just get their answers from the AI.
"Google wrote the rules, they created the game and they rewarded the players," Navarro says. "Now they're turning around and saying, 'That's my infrastructure, the web just happens to live in it.' I think it's going to destroy the open web as we know it, for sure. It probably already has."
Say hello to the machine web
The greatest impact of AI Mode will be on the experience you have online every day. We may, some believe, be at the dawn of a new paradigm, a future you might call the "machine web". One where websites are built for AI to read rather than for humans, and reading summaries by chatbots becomes a primary way we consume information.
Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, the company's AI research lab, said in a recent interview that he believes publishers will want to feed their content directly to AI models to facilitate this and some may not bother putting that information on websites for human beings to read. "I think things will be pretty different in a few years," he said.
It would be a world with the answers always conveniently on tap. But it could also bring an end to some of those things that have made the open web so popular in the first place – the opportunity to fall down online rabbit holes, to chance upon something delightful or to find something new. In an interview with the podcast Decoder, Pichai said that in the end, it will come down to what users prefer.
Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare, which provides network services for nearly a fifth of all websites, foresees a bigger problem. "Robots don't click on ads," he says.
If AI becomes the audience, how do creators get paid? One possibility is direct compensation. The New York Times is licensing content to Amazon for its AI. Google pays Reddit $60m (£44m) a year to train AI on user data. Dozens of giant publishers and media conglomerates have reportedly signed similar deals with OpenAI and others.
But so far, only massive websites with lots of data are pulling in these deals. "I don't think that paying for content like this is a model that will work at the scale necessary to sustain the web," says Tom Critchlow, executive vice president at advertising technology firm Raptive. "It's difficult to see how that would work as a replacement for the decline in clicks."
If making money on the web gets harder, Adams and others expect there will also be a mass exodus to social media. For many, like Navarro, that's already happening.
HouseFresh has pivoted to YouTube. But Navarro says the whims of social media algorithms are even more fickle, and the platforms force creators to sacrifice depth and detail in favour of showmanship. "There's no incentive to build the same high-quality content," Navarro says. "Everything becomes about monetisation and transition, and it forces you to inform less and sell more." Across the board, Navarro says the loss of autonomy publishers had on the web means lower quality content for you as the audience.
There are other search engines people could try instead, of course, although they too are integrating AI into their search tools – Microsoft, for example, has been building AI into its Bing search engine. But Google's smaller competitors have so little market share it's difficult to see them making a dent in the economy – and many are adding their own AI tools.
The machine web, if that is where things are going, may be more closed, less diverse and in a real sense, flatter for the people who spend their time online.
But some observers aren't panicking. "I'm not worried in the sense that this is all an evolution," says Dame Wendy Hall, a computer science professor at University of Southampton and one of the early pioneers who designed the architecture that was a forerunner of the World Wide Web in the 1980s. "AI is now coming into the equation and it's going to change all the dynamics. I wouldn't want to say exactly what's going to happen," she says. "The web is still there and it's still open. If Google goes this way, some bright spark will come up with a new way of making money.
"Something will happen. But I guess for many people along the way, it will be too late."
What users want
There is little doubt AI Mode is an impressive piece of technology. It deploys a "fan out method" where the AI breaks your question into subtopics and does multiple searches simultaneously. Google says this lets AI Mode recommends more diverse sources, produce deeper answers to more complex queries, dives deeper – and you have the ability to ask follow-up questions.
According to Google, reactions to AI Overviews suggest AI Mode will be extremely popular. "As people use AI Overviews, we see they are happier with their results, and they search more often," Pichai said at Google's developer conference. "It's one of the most successful launches in search in the past decade." In other words, Google says this makes Search better and it's what users want.
But that's no justification, says Danielle Coffey, president of News/Media Alliance, a trade group representing more than 2,200 journalism and media outlets. (The BBC is a member of the News/Media Alliance.)
"This is the definition of theft. The AI answers are a substitute for the original product. They're making money on our content and we get nothing in return," Coffey says. "It's not Google's place to make this business decision on behalf of the people who are producing the goods being sold."
The problem, Coffey and others say, is publishers have no choice. Internal documents released in a court case show Google chose to "silently update" its rules, so participating in Google Search means websites automatically give their permission to use content for AI. Publishers can opt-out – but only if they opt-out of search results altogether.
A Google spokesperson says these documents show early discussions that don't reflect the company's final decision-making process, and publishers have always controlled whether their content is available on Google. The spokesperson says Google offers controls that let website owners choose to keep their content out of responses from AI Mode and AI Overviews.
"The AI answers are a substitute for the original product," says Coffey. "I don't see that being a business proposition that we would ever willingly opt into."
Over the past year, US courts have found Google operates not one but two illegal monopolies in the search engine and digital advertising businesses. The courts are still determining the consequences, and there's a real possibility of a breakup that could deal a serious blow to Google's control of the web. Google says it disagrees with the courts' decisions and plans to appeal. The company argues it faces immense competition, and proposals to break up the company would be worse for consumers and slow innovation.
But Google's grip may already be loosening, in small ways. During these trials, Apple executive Eddy Cue said Google searches in Safari have fallen for the first time in 22 years, probably because people are using AI chatbots instead. Google issued a statement arguing the company continues to see overall query growth, including from Apple devices.
A recent survey found nearly 72% of Americans sometimes use AI tools such as ChatGPT in place of search engines. "I think you learn more when you do the searching yourself," says Mike King, founder of SEO agency iPullRank. "But a lot of people feel they don't need all that."
But AI may come with significant costs. "It's going to create more filter bubbles, because now Google is interpreting that information rather than giving it to you," King says. Research on AI chatbots suggests they have a tendency to act as echo chambers. "The info you expect is going to be reinforced," King says.
Then, of course, there are fundamental concerns about the quality of AI answers. Some research suggests AI hallucinations are getting worse as their technical abilities improve. Even Sundar Pichai said on a podcast interview that hallucinations are "an inherent feature" of the technology – though Google is using its traditional search methods to ground AI responses, and the company says accuracy is improving. Google tells the BBC the vast majority of AI search responses are factual, and their accuracy is on par with other Search features.
Still, early slip ups – like the times when Google's AI Overviews told people to eat rocks and add glue to pizza recipes – linger in the public consciousness. Google jumps to fix errors, but on a recent Thursday in 2025, one year into AI Overviews, the AI said it wasn't Thursday and it wasn't 2025. My mistake.
Research suggests that AI could even produce an echo-chamber effect with the very misinformation it hallucinates – something computer scientists have coined "chat chambers". A Google spokesperson says its AI is designed to match your interests without limiting what you find on the web.
While the spectre of the machine web is disquieting for many who build and depend on the internet, Google paints a different, vibrant picture. "You will see us five years from now sending a lot of traffic out to the web. I think that's the product direction we are committed to," Pichai told Decoder. Google tells the BBC its vision is one where AI enhances search, builds on the types of questions users can ask, and ultimately expands opportunities to create and discover content, albeit in potentially different ways.
"I'm not going to predict what is going to happen, because, of course, the future is multifactorial," says Cory Doctorow, a longtime technology advocate and writer of the upcoming book Enshittification about the decay of online platforms. "But, if I were still someone who valued Google as a way to find information or to have my information found, I'd be really worried about this."
But he also feels it could be a moment for internet users to push for the changes they want to see. "It's a crisis we shouldn't let go to waste," says Doctorow. "Google's about to do something that's going to make people really angry. My first thought is 'Okay, great. What can we do to capitalise on that anger?' It's a chance to build a coalition."
More like this:• The hidden world beneath the shadows of YouTube's algorithm• The Ghosts of India's TikTok• The people stuck using ancient Windows computers
Some aren't waiting for Google's vision to materialise or for regulators to act. Matthew Prince of Cloudflare is championing direct intervention. His plan is to have Cloudflare and a consortium of publishers of all sizes collectively block AI crawlers unless tech companies pay for the content. It's an audacious bid to "reset the norms of what's allowed online" and force Silicon Valley to negotiate for the data that fuels their models. (Google did not respond to questions about this proposal.) "My very optimistic version," Prince says, "is one where humans get content for free and bots have to pay a tonne for it."
Navarro says it's hard not to feel nostalgic for what might be lost, even if something new and great might come in its place. "That web is what happens when a bunch of people connect on the topics they care about," she says, reminiscing about a Spanish language fan site she created as a child for the rock band Queen. "I went searching for Queen but there wasn't a lot of content about the band at the time in Spanish. So I went and started making it, adding something to the web when I was 10 years old because I felt I could just do that.
"I want to believe that this isn't the end."
* Thomas Germain is a senior technology journalist for the BBC. He's covered AI, privacy and the furthest reaches of internet culture for the better part of a decade. You can find him on X and TikTok @thomasgermain.
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