Google is building AI fence around the internet it once championed

Google's AI-powered search is keeping users on its platform, raising concerns that declining traffic to websites could threaten the future of the open web

By Kate Conger

 

When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world. “We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Page said. 

Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merc-hants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. Now in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it. Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with AI. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its AI chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them. The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever. 

 

Users are writing queries three times as long as the keyword-heavy questions they asked of traditional searches, Google said at its developer conference in May. People are spending one to nine more minutes in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches, according to three studies from researchers tallied by The New York Times. One October study from Growth Memo found that in about 75 per cent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web. For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the firm has increasingly incorporated AI into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its AI-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.

Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of the technology website The Verge, has warned publishers for years that they would face “Goog-le Zero,” a moment when traffic from Google would plummet to nothing. “For publishers, Google Zero is already here,” he said.  

Google has denied that it is endangering the open web. In a blog post last August, Liz Reid, a vice president of search, said that the company’s ethos had not changed and that it was sending out a “relatively stable” number of clicks numbering in the billions. Reports of a decline in search traffic were “inaccurate” and relied on “flawed methodologies,” she said. 

A Google spokesman said the study that found that users stayed in AI Mode 75 per cent of the time was flawed because it relied on a small sample size and gave users specific tasks that did not reflect normal user behavior. 

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. While someone might once have Googled a soccer player’s World Cup performance and clicked to a sports site or a social media thread for commentary, a bot now crawls the web for that information and returns the player’s statistics to the user, who stays on Google. 

In total, more than 50 per cent of web traffic is now nonhuman, Cloudflare said. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 percent, it added. 

The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages Wikipedia, said it had experienced an 8 per cent decline in human visitors to its site over the past year. At the same time, it has seen an increase in bots scraping its site for data to train AI models. “My work is to ensure that people don’t forget about us because Google’s user interface changed,” said Selena Deckelmann, the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer.

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