Google betrayed the web - by Mike Elgan - Machine Society
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Google betrayed the web<br>Google was built on a Grand Bargain with content creators: traffic for content. Now it wants content without giving traffic. It’s time for a post-Google internet.
Mike Elgan<br>May 23, 2026
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VITTORIO VENETO, ITALY, MAY 23, 2026 — Google launched new products and features at Google I/O this week, and they add up to a disaster for the internet.<br>Google has unilaterally ended the traffic-for-content bargain that built the web — hoovering up the web’s output to train and feed its AI, then re-serving that output as answers, agentic purchases, and on-demand interfaces that bypass the publishers, creators, and independent sites whose work made the answers possible in the first place.<br>To oversimplify, Google is double dipping on content, using the work and investment by content creators and publishers to train its models, then again using it to serve up information. The company is planning to aggressively offer most of this copied content directly to users, rather than linking them them to websites or channels.<br>Originally, Google was a conduit between content creators and consumers. They did this faithfully not only with Search, but with other products like Google Reader. Website owners could always opt out of search crawling, but most didn’t because they wanted to be found when people looked for content using Google Search.<br>Then, in 2012, Google started breaking bad. That’s the year they launched the Knowledge Graph, making Google Search a destination for many users and types of queries, rather than only a way for people to find the websites that answered questions.<br>Google got huge by relying on publisher content under the Grand Bargain; it has now used that dominant position to launch products that capture the value of that content while denying publishers a way to make a living.<br>To be very clear: They can do this because they are a monopoly, and this abuse of that monopoly is or should be illegal.<br>Let’s take a look at just a few of the content creator types that Google is betraying and how.<br>The betrayal of publishers
AI Mode is now seamlessly fused with AI Overviews so a “search” leads to an answer or a conversation on the Google site. (AI Overviews were short, AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of a regular Google search results page, while AI Mode was a separate, dedicated conversational search experience that let you ask complex, multi-part questions and follow-ups in a chatbot-style interface powered by Gemini.)<br>Yes, it’s possible to click through to websites. But Google is increasingly working hard to disincentivize that.<br>Even before the new fusion, the consensus range across independent studies was roughly a 35–65% reduction in click-through rates when AI Overviews are present. Some publishers report up to 90% reductions in Google Search traffic to their stories. Those numbers are about to get way worse for content creators of all types.<br>Google also announced a new Information Agents feature for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers that continuously monitors the web for users and proactively pings them when something relevant appears. (The product launches in summer 2026 in the U.S.)<br>By funneling recurring traffic to a handful of agent-selected pages, publishers lose not just the first click but the return visits that drive loyalty, subscriptions, and direct ad revenue. The “content consumer” stops being a customer of the publisher, and instead becomes the customer of Google. The publisher’s expected new role is to voluntarily serve as a free data feed for Google.<br>Check out my latest Computerworld column, With AI, typing’s out, talking’s in, in which I predict the death of keyboards and the end of typing as a skill.<br>(Want more Mike? Contact, listen, watch, read, and follow)
The betrayal of affiliate marketers
Another new Google announcement is a multi-merchant checkout standard with Shopify, Walmart, and Wayfair, paired with Gemini Spark — a “24/7 personal AI agent” that spends your money for you. This is currently in beta and should be available to all this summer. In this new attack, Google kneecaps content creators who rely on affiliate revenue.<br>In the past, people searching for, say, luggage, would search Google, and Google would link to both online stores and product content sites. The content sites might write about luggage, with links going to Amazon or elsewhere as part of an affiliate program. If the user bought something on Amazon as a result of the link, the content creator would get a small piece of it.<br>In the new scenario, coming this summer, the same user performs the same search for luggage on the Google site. items from multiple stores are placed in a Universal Cart, which is an AI-powered shopping hub that follows you across Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail. When the user is ready to buy, Google’s agent runs off and buys it from the selected retailer, cutting the content...