Google AI Search Killing Outclicks and Free, Independent Media

I started blogging 21 years ago. Writing online and interacting with people who read what I wrote led me to believe that the Internet was liberating us from the confines of discourse dominated by a few profit-driven corporations. The Internet—a printing press in every kitchen and every pocket!—would transform us from passive consumers of corporate media to active producers and sharers of text, audio, and video that would empower us to more directly participate in democracy.

I’m pretty sure I was wrong. The free (and freeing!) Internet is dying. Google and the other tech giants are killing independent online journalism as surely as the Internet killed traditional print journalism. The tech giants are using artificial intelligence to press us all into the same old strait-jacket of corporate-dominated, profit-driven discourse.

And most people are shrugging at the fading promise of what I was hoping the Internet could provide, the Magnificent Humanity that Pope Leo warns artificial intelligence may erode, and letting the chatbots tell them what to think.

These thoughts came crashing together as I listened yesterday to Meghna Chakrabarti’s conversation with tech journalist Timothy Germain about the profound impact of Google’s transformation of Web search from providing lists of links to spotlighting AI-generated answers:

So it used to be that when you went online, evaluating where that information was coming from was a huge part of the work that you were doing, of looking things up, right? This is an entirely different paradigm where Google is often providing links to other web pages, but the design of the page discourages you from clicking on those links, partially because Google’s just giving you the answer and partially because the links are small and buried.

Because clearly part of the goal here is to keep people on Google and keep them off other parts of the internet, and there are lots of statistics that show this is happening today. After the changes where Google added AI a couple years ago, the number of searches where people begin and end on Google, they call these zero-click searches, have grown to something like 60% [Timothy Germain, interviewed by Meghna Chakrabarti, “Is Google’s New AI Search Killing the Internet?” WBUR: On Point, 2026.05.27.

Google used to help independent blogs and other websites get attention, build an audience, and sustain themselves. Giving AI-generated answers, de-emphasizing the original sources, and depressing outclicks nukes that business model:

For most of the last 30 years, the entire rise of the internet, things were built on this unspoken agreement that you would let, as a website, you would let Google scrape your content free and serve it up in its search engine. And in exchange, they would send people to your website if the information was high quality, and then you could sell them a subscription or sell a product or show them ads.

Now, there’s a new exchange. Where Google scrapes your information free, and you get maybe nothing at all, and this is a radical transformation in the business model of the internet. And I’ve been talking to experts about this for a couple years.

Some people I say, “What we’re looking at is an extinction event for websites on the internet.” I talked to one guy last year, and he said, “I think that’s a little melodramatic. I wouldn’t call it extinction. I think decimation is a more accurate word” [Germain, in Chakrabarti, 2026.05.27].

Under Google’s AI search, you make yourself heard not with a website but with tweets and Tiktoks… and that’s not the discourse that makes a better society:

Used to be if you wanted to start a media business, you’d create a website. Now, you would start a social media channel. And that has all kinds of consequences because there’s a very particular kind of content that does well on social media. It’s much more limiting than the old world was [Germain, in Chakrabarti, 2026.05.27].

The diehards who insist on retaining their independence and producing something more substantive and lasting than a dozen 20-word posts a day under another corporations URL will struggle to pay their rent, and more of the things worth reading online will end up locked behind paywalls:

People will start charging subscriptions. They’ll find a way. And it’s the worth hanging onto that for a second. One of the big things that’s changing here is this old world where everything was free online is going away. You’ve certainly noticed that there are more paywalls going up, and that is partially because the old system where Google would send you traffic and you could make enough money showing those people ads is dying.

And businesses that can charge a premium for their content and have enough of a loyal audience may be able to survive. Anyone else who can’t do that sort of thing is going out of business [Germain, in Chakrabarti, 2026.05.27].

See for yourself—that’s one of the core empowering principles of blogging. Sure, I lay out my opinions and analysis, but I load my blog posts with hyperlinks inviting you to see for yourself, read the original sources, evaluate those texts, and draw your own conclusions.

Google’s AI search abandons that principle. Google would rather you get a pat answer from its robot and never leave the confines of its corporate surveillance and ad space to hear from independent voices directly. That switch to AI answers will decimate the free Internet and make it harder for all of us to find, read, share, and produce interesting and useful things to read online.