Google is discovering that when you give people the answer, they stop looking for it.
For years, Google built an empire on sending people
somewhere else. You searched, got ten blue links, clicked a website, read an
article, maybe bought something. Google delivered the traffic, publishers
created the content, advertisers paid the bills. Everybody had a seat at the
table.
Then came AI.
Google’ response? Push AI Overviews to the top of search
results. Convenient, efficient, clever.
Except there's a small problem with giving people everything
they want without asking them to go anywhere. They don't go anywhere.
If Google's AI answers the question, why click the article?
Why visit the recipe blog, the travel site, or the independent publication that
did the actual research?
Google may gain something from this. It can keep users
inside its ecosystem, collect more interaction data, control more of the
experience, and potentially create new advertising opportunities. It could
evolve from a search engine into the place where the internet gets interpreted.
But it risks weakening the very publishers and creators
supplying the information its AI depends on.
Websites need visitors. Visitors generate revenue. Revenue pays for journalism, research, reviews, and original content. Take away enough of that incentive and eventually there's less new material to feed the machine. Because I can't resist a good analogy, think of a restaurant firing all its suppliers because it's discovered a clever way to rearrange yesterday's leftovers.
There's also something else at stake: Discovery. Search used
to take you places. You could stumble across an unexpected idea, read a
contrary opinion, follow an interesting trail. An AI summary gives you the
answer, or at least something that looks like one. But sometimes the most
interesting part of a story is precisely what gets left out.
Google may win the battle for attention, keep users on its
platform, and turn every question into an opportunity to sell something. But the
more successfully it answers everything, the more it risks destroying the
ecosystem that supplies those answers.
Because AI doesn't create the internet from thin air. It
feeds on the work of people who research, write, report, experiment, and share
what they know.
Starve those people of traffic and revenue long enough, and
eventually the well runs dry.
Google may be building the world's smartest answer machine,
but it should probably worry about who'll be left to ask the questions. And
who'll be left to provide the answers.
