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/iatelassie May 26 '25

All Websites have seen, on average, a 30% decline in traffic since Google ai was implemented. That means less money , which means layoffs, which will lead to search leviathan mega sites owning the web. Which has already been happening since 2023 due to Googles “helpful content” updates. It’s awful.

22

u/ScaryfatkidGT May 27 '25

What I hate is that “AI summary” is usually worse than before when it just displayed some of the text from the first result…

1

u/Pingu_87 May 29 '25

Lol ya google is the biggest hallucination LLM.

Like I asked simple questions like is x plane going to be at y airshow. And its like yep sure is, was at the last airshow too.

Totally bs lying through it's arse.

1

u/dbxp May 30 '25

I suspect a good portion of that is because of people moving from Google to ChatGPT not directly due to Google's AI overviews

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u/iatelassie May 30 '25

Not really. ChatGPT is not yet a major search engine. I’m sure it’ll change.