Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately
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Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately
Could the Chocolate Factory's mission to reshape the web backfire?
Brandon Vigliarolo
Brandon<br>Vigliarolo
Published<br>mon 25 May 2026 // 00:00 UTC
KETTLE Google I/O has ostensibly been an AI show for a few years running, but this year's announcements have taken the cake, which Google seems all to happy to let its users eat as it reshapes the web.<br>On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source reporter Liam Proven to discuss how Google's bevy of AI announcements, and declaration that we're entering the era of AI search, might not play well with customers.<br>From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web.
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You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity.
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Brandon (00:04)<br>Welcome back to another episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm your host Brandon Vigliarolo, and you've likely heard about this week's topic if you've paid any attention to the internet in the past week. Google said at its annual I/O event that it's reinventing search for the AI era. But from an outsider perspective, it seems a lot more like Google's leaning into AI as an excuse to reshape the web and Gemini's image, regardless of how that might affect access to the open web. Unpredictably, there are a lot of people calling foul over that and other recent AI moves made by Google.<br>With me to discuss this is El Reg Senior Reporter Tom Claburn. And joining us for the first time on this iteration of the kettle is our open source guru Liam Proven. Thanks to both of you for being here.<br>Thomas Claburn (00:45)<br>Thanks.<br>Liam Proven (00:46)<br>Thank you.<br>Brandon (00:46)
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So hey, Google's AI-ification of search was the big news to come out of I/O this week. Tom, you tuned into the keynote and wrote about this. So what exactly did Google say it's going to do and why is everyone so up in arms over this?<br>Thomas Claburn (01:01)<br>I mean, it's just more encroachment of AI into search and they, you know, they have their AI Overviews, which are the little summaries that they put up on top of search results. And then they also have separate thing that's very similarly named, but different called AI Mode, which is available through a tab and you click on it that's sort of a deeper version of AI, I think it ties into some, Google knowledge graph and it has sort of a broader thing, but you often get similar results, but basically they're going to be showing more of the AI Overviews and, it's not always clear when these happen, but basically for longer queries, it's more likely to be handed off to an AI model.<br>Brandon (01:44)<br>Mm-hmm.<br>Thomas Claburn (01:45)<br>And it's a problem for a lot of people because people's relationship with Google began with: you go to Google, you find stuff, and then you leave. And increasingly, it's you go to Google and you're stuck there like it's a tar pit. And you're just trying to figure out where did they get this information? And they'll put up a summary. And of course, they have the disclaimer, well, you know, maybe it's not accurate. You'll have to check on that. How are you going to check on it? I'll go to the links that we didn't show you. It's, you know, people I think are a little bit – I mean, part of it is just people don't like change, but part of it is just AI really is not the right answer for a lot of things, at least in my opinion. I think there are certain kinds of queries that it can be useful for. And I think that largely though, if people are going to look for documents, they need to be able to find reputable sites and be able to make trust decisions. And a lot of that information is getting obscured or put into little teeny citation chips that you have to click on to figure out, where is this information coming from?<br>Brandon (02:49)
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Yeah, and sometimes when you click on one site, it'll give you four or five links and be like, well, here's the sources we use to compile this information. Like a lot of times, I'll admit, I do use the AI Overviews every once in a while when they pop up, especially for simple questions like on my smartphone or something. But they'll give you, cite their sources and you click on them. But sometimes that's just as big a pain in the butt as assuming that the AI Overview is just correct. I'd much rather just have a list of blue links, which Google did clarify to me and to Avram, our US editor, earlier this week, that traditional...