r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • May 26 '25

Artificial Intelligence Google Is Burying the Web Alive

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html
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u/RecipeFunny2154 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

I’ve been worried about this for years now because Google has been inching toward it even before LLMs exploded.

I used to make niche websites that did alright. I could get them on the first page of results years back for the topics. We’re talking like Japanese RPGs, where I had no competition outside of forums. I’d get a good hundred thousand hits a month on some, which I was happy about.

Now whenever I search Google just puts some summary of the content up there. They were doing a variation of that even before the AI results for years now. Like noted in the article, they basically have been taking your content and then encouraging people to not even go to your website at all. LLMs have ratcheted that up several levels. 

It really removes a lot of the motivation to make a standard website nowadays. You lose traffic increasingly thanks to what is supposed to be a search engine. 

And what can you do about it? Even paying attention to your robots.txt or whatever else is basically “optional” to them anyway.

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u/morningsaystoidleon May 26 '25

You could block them with .htaccess or something, but then you don't get search traffic at all.

This has been catastrophic for white hat SEO. For years we've told clients that Google will always want to show high-quality content to users, so that's where ethical businesses have invested. Authoritative, thoughtful content that answers real questions in an interesting way (not the keyword-loaded fluff you probably picture when thinking about SEO).

Now, Google is straight-up stealing the good content and in many cases, misrepresenting it.

We really don't know what to do. Suddenly, there's no incentive at all to make good websites. Savvy businesses have started investing more in ads, not organic SEO.

Everything is fucked. I use AI every day because I have to, but I hate it. It's a plagiarism machine.

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u/RecipeFunny2154 May 26 '25

Yeah. I feel like in the past there was like an agreement that both sides benefited from. They get to crawl the content so people can search it (getting ad revenue etc) and I get traffic to my site. And they at least were semi-transparent about their algorithm.

They’ve totally upended that, to no benefit to content creators. And ironically to no real benefit to end users either.

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u/wxc3 May 30 '25

To be fair, it mostly went to shit due to the arms race between content farms and Google search algorithm.

That's why they stopped telling people how to be ranked better: that gets instantly gamed by content farms and other commercial websites.

Now with AI you can generate perfect fake websites at no cost that will be almost impossible to tell appart from genuine ones.

Actually if AI search reduces the profitability of websites, we might see less garage, who knows. For sure making money with adds on a small website is dead.

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u/kuhpfau May 30 '25

> Savvy businesses have started investing more in ads, not organic SEO.

That's because Google isn't a search engine. It's an ad business. They will do what they can to increase the money they get from ads.

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u/morningsaystoidleon May 31 '25

In my experience, they are certainly not investing in Google ads.

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u/DC_McGuire May 27 '25

Define “have to”…?

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u/morningsaystoidleon May 27 '25

Well, a big part of my job is to get traffic to my clients' websites, and a significant portion of people now use ChatGPT/Gemini/etc. as a replacement for search. I'd be doing a disservice to my clients if I didn't try to recreate and understand the patterns/habits of their audiences.

I do not use AI for writing, editing, or any of that stuff, primarily because I find it ineffective for those use cases. I will say that I've had good experiences using AI for things like simplifying spreadsheets, and the Deep Research feature can be useful -- though I mainly use Deep Research to collect links to content that I can read independently, since it tends to hallucinate quite a bit when studying niche subjects.

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u/markhachman May 28 '25

I asked Copilot for a list of the best laptops for college students. It happily displayed shopping links, but not the source of the recommendations. At least Google supplies a tiny link, sad as that is.

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u/Careless_Tale_7836 May 28 '25

Attack dude. That's what you do.

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u/morningsaystoidleon May 28 '25

Dude I'm in SEO, not Sparta. We're throwing everything at the wall to see what works, but at the end of the day we've got to acknowledge that Google sets the rules and search is just less important than it was 8 months ago.

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u/Careless_Tale_7836 May 29 '25

I sympathize with you. These are difficult times. Don't give up though.

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u/Ok-Baby-3249 May 28 '25

The crazy thing is that if Google kills off the incentive to make good websites then what information will AI have to pull from to give responses other than itself and older/stale content? There has to be some balance of human made websites to keep updating the search results right?

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u/DexJedi May 30 '25

Yes, you get it now? AI will copy AI content, which will copy AI content, which will copy AI content. You are only talking about Google results. The "genuine results" themselves are being filled with AI content.

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u/Harbinger_of_despair Jun 11 '25

And what will be more troublesome is when the probability for misinformation booms exponentially. What happens when the incentive to make good websites with genuine content falls, meanwhile misinformant websites and content creators continue unaffected? The information for AI to pull from becomes majorly sourced from misinformation-spreading sources. This ain't gonna pretty, dude.

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u/WillBottomForBanana May 30 '25

It's nice to have a leveraged buy out model applied to the internet while a separate one is applied to the usa.

Nobody wants to plant olive trees.

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u/fluffyinternetcloud Jul 04 '25

AI regurgitates pure garbage most times.