Google admits “open web is already in rapid decline” as ad-revenue plummets and search results deteriorate

When Google came onto the stage nearly thirty years ago, it was a revolution in how people could search the world wide web. The company became the go-to search engine within a few years and now completely dominates the field.

That success made Google a verb in its own right, to express looking for things online. But now with the advent of artificial intelligence, all the doors it once set people knocking at, are seeing far fewer callers. Google itself says that the days of the open internet as we know it are coming to an end.

Goodbye open web, AI is reshaping the online experience

While Google has been declaring that the world wide web is thriving, in recent court filings in an antitrust trial to stave off its ad business being split off, it admitted that doing so would accelerate the disintegration of the open web. “The open web is already in rapid decline,” stated lawyers for the tech giant as reported by The Verge.

A spokesperson told the outlet that that statement was “cherry-picked” adding, “We are pointing out the obvious: that investments in non-open web display advertising like connected TV and retail media are growing at the expense of those in open web display advertising.”

However, Google’s own AI assistant, Gemini, states that the company’s “AI Overviews are hurting website traffic, particularly for organic listings.”

Gemini says that “AI Overviews aim to provide immediate, comprehensive answers directly on the search results page.” This has led to “zero-click” searches as “users often find the information they need without ever clicking through to a website.”

“Measurable declines” in traffic to organic wbesites

Also, studies from third-party agencies and tool providers in the search traffic industry say that there are “measurable declines in [Click-Through Rates (CTR)] for traditional organic listings when AI Overviews are present.” Analysis shows that the drop in traffic can be as high as 34.5% for links posted in the first position, “and even larger losses when combined with featured snippets.”

Furthermore, AI Overviews appear at the very top of search results which means that organic listings get pushed farther down the search engine results page, “sometimes entirely below the fold.”

This means that companies that rely on traffic to make revenue by having display ads on their site are seeing their incomes plummet.

Adding insult to injury, ‘AI slop’, low-quality content developed by artificial intelligence, is positioning itself at the top of search engine results pages exploiting Google’s algorithms, which can change on the flip of a switch without content providers knowing.

For his part, when The Verge asked Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai about whether AI overviews and AI mode actually send more traffic out than search engine results pages before they were rolled out, he said, “We are definitely sending traffic to a wider range of sources and publishers.”

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