Google is building an AI fence around the free Internet it once championed

“We believe that a properly functioning society should have abundant, free and impartial access to high-quality information,” Page said. Google complied with that responsibility acting as a gateway to the internet. Responded to user searches with hyperlink listsdirecting them to what’s known as the “open web”—the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities, and others—for more information.

In the following decades, Google became one of the richest and most powerful companies of the planet by connecting people to the vastness of the open web.

Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, the company appears to be retreating from the open web, and I may be putting her in danger..

Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has renewed its search engine with artificial intelligence. He introduced the AI modewhich replaces hyperlink search results with conversational responses written by Geminiyour AI chatbot. More recently, Google modified its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that users could add photos and videos to their queries and assign AI “agents” to They will search for them.

The effect of these measures is becoming evident: People are spending more time on Google than ever.

The company announced at its developer conference in May that Users write queries three times as long than traditional searches with many keywords. According to three studies compiled by The New York Timespeople pass one to nine minutes longer in AI Mode than traditional Google searches. An October study from Growth Memo, a newsletter focused on search and marketing, found that in about 75% of sessions, users They never left AI Mode to browse the web.

For publishers, companies, banks and others who depended on Google to direct their billions of users to their websites, The impact has been undeniable.as the company has increasingly incorporated AI into searches. Google users no longer leave the platform after performing a search, but simply read the answers generated by AI, which translates into fewer visitors to their websites and a search traffic drop.

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of technology website The Vergecarry years warning editors that they would face a “Google Zero”a time when traffic from Google would plummet to nothing.

“For publishers, Google Zero is now a reality,” he said. “It wasn’t until the arrival of AI Mode that people realized that this gradual advancement was about to reach a turning point”.

These changes threaten the open web and demonstrate how quickly AI has transformed the technological landscape. Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, had envisioned the web as a tool for global collaboration without borderswhere people could create their own websites and freely browse between sites created by others.

Much of that vision has faded over the years, as tech giants like Apple and Meta created “walled gardens” or technological ecosystems where users could find almost everything they needed under one roof. Now, AI has indisputably accelerated that trajectory, Berners-Lee said in a 2024 essay.

Technology companies have built empires that have gained user loyalty and have focused on maximizing profits instead of improving public service. “The rapid advancement of AI has exacerbated these concerns,” he wrote, adding that it is “demonstrating that problems on the web are not isolated, but are deeply intertwined with emerging technologies.”

Google has denied be endangering the open web. In a blog post last August, Liz Reid, vice president of search, stated that the company’s philosophy had not changed and that continued to generate a “relatively stable” number of clickswhich amounted to billions. According to her, reports of a decline in search traffic were “inaccurate” and based on “flawed methodologies.”

“We care deeply, perhaps more than any other companyfor the health of the web ecosystem,” Reid said.

Since publishing that blog post, Google has incorporated more AI to your search engine. It has also created some features to get users out of AI mode and browse the web in general, such as website previews for some answers and a tool that allows you to configure “preferred sources” so that the AI ​​consults its favorite media more frequently. Additionally, the company has created a profile that helps publishers and creators promote their work in search results.

“Google’s AI search capabilities send billions of clicks to the web each week, meeting people’s changing preferences for how they want to find information, while generating a significant trafficking to websites,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company’s AI features highlight links to the web.

According to him, the study that concluded that users stayed in AI mode 75 percent of the time was flawed because it was based on a small sample and assigned users specific tasks that did not reflect normal user behavior.

Still, the searches They are increasingly carried out by chatbots with artificial intelligence, while the number of people visiting websites is declining, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company. Whereas previously someone might have Googled a soccer player’s World Cup performance and accessed a sports site or social media thread to read comments, now a bot crawls the web for that information and returns the player’s statistics to the user, who stay on Google.

In total, More than 50 percent of web traffic now does not come from humansaccording to Cloudflare. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to the websites of companies in sectors such as finance, publishing and retail fell by almost 40 percent, it added.

Cloudflare has stated that The fundamental economic model of the web has changedand that chatbot-type search tools, like those from Google, could endanger the open web if left unchecked.

Google’s AI, along with other popular chatbots, harrived at Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia, reported a 8% decrease in the number of human visitors to your site over the past year. At the same time, you’ve seen an increase in bots scraping data from your site to train AI models.

“My job is to make sure that people don’t forget about us because Google’s user interface has changed,” said Selena Deckelmann, director of product and technology at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia has started promote your own app and social media channels to connect with readers outside the Google ecosystemhe stated. In addition, it began charging Google and other AI companies for access to its data for training.

Last month, the British Competition and Markets Authority demanded Google to modify its search tools with AI in the United Kingdom to address the editors’ concerns. The regulatory body indicated that Google must include clear links to attribute content in chatbot responses, a measure intended to generate traffic to websites. The company must also allow website operators to opt out of having their content displayed in AI summaries and is rolling out these changes to search globally.

For some open web advocates, the fact that people can leave Google’s ecosystem is still enough.

“Whether you use a traditional search method or artificial intelligence, I think Google continues to make the Internet easier to access,” said Tori Noble, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties online. “It is not a closed universe,” compared to closed platforms like Facebookwhich requires login to access, he added.

That’s not much comfort to some website operators.

In May, Vox Media, owner of The Verge and other publications, began sell some of your websites. Jim Bankoff, CEO of Vox Media, said the drastic drop in search traffic influenced his decision to sell about half of the company to James Murdoch. In June, The Verge and several other Vox Media websites were sold to Penske Media.

Google has often said that it is “driving more traffic and that the web is bigger than ever“Patel said, but concluded: “Right next door are a bunch of editors whose businesses are being destroyed“.