Opinion | Google Is Turning The Internet Into Its Own Prison, And Nobody Can Do Anything About It

For most of the 21st century, Google played a significant role in web users' lives. Its traditional search engine has served as the engine of the internet. Just before Google went public in 2004, one of its two co-founders, Larry Page, declared in an interview that the company wanted to provide a service by acting as a gateway. "We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible," Page said. For years, the company fulfilled that promise. A search on Google would direct you to 10 blue links to various websites, and in the process, the web thrived, traffic reached ever-new heights, and both Google and web publishers made money. Users benefited from being able to search across alternative websites for their queries.

But now, with its new AI-based search features, the tech giant has almost stopped sending queries to websites. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode answer questions without users needing to leave the page to visit other sites. Google's own services, from shopping to YouTube videos, feature prominently at the top of its results. In May, the company changed its search engine for the first time in 25 years, allowing people to add photos and videos to their queries and to assign AI "agents" to run searches for them. This means users will stay much longer on Google. People are spending up to nine minutes more in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches, according to three studies, tallied by The New York Times. One study from Growth Memo, which the paper quoted, found that in about 75% of cases, users never left Google's AI Mode for the web.

This threatens not only the survival of web publishers but also the future of the internet itself. The web, designed for human clicks, is increasingly used by AI agents and bots. Researchers at the internet service provider Cloudflare reported last month that more than 50% of internet traffic is now non-human, with staggering implications for publishers, content owners, and the future of the open web. They also found that between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites fell by nearly 40%, hurting almost all businesses, from media to retail and IT. Google, with its dominance in search, the Chrome browser, and the world's largest video hosting site, YouTube, virtually controls the web. Globally, Google search has a market share of about 90%; in India, it's 95%.

Google Zero

Last month, Steve Hoffman, the CEO of Reddit, one of Google's major search beneficiaries, told CNBC that Google's AI Overviews have created uncertainty over search-driven traffic. The company's shares fell more than 11% despite reporting better-than-expected profits that day, underscoring concerns about Google's changes. According to the Wall Street Journal, Reddit is considering cutting off the tech giant's access to its content. Roger Lynch, the CEO of Conde Nast, the parent company of Vogue and Vanity Fair, has also reportedly told his staff to start planning for a future in which Google sends them effectively no traffic at all. There are reports of other companies considering similar moves to try to survive.

In a report published earlier this year, the Reuters Institute found that traffic to news websites from Google's search engine plunged by a third in 2025. News industry bosses said they expected traffic to fall by a further 43% over the next three years. Over the past 12 months, Google search traffic to publishers fell by an average of 34%. Washington Post, Business Insider, CNN, Reuters, and Time fell by more than 31%, according to search measurement firm Semrush. USA Today, which owns hundreds of titles in the US, lost 18% of traffic. Another search optimisation firm, Systrix, has reported up to a 30% drop in clicks in Germany. In Britain, Reach, the owner of the Mirror, Express, and dozens of regional titles, also warned of a sharp decline in referrals from Google. Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the US technology website The Verge, has called the trend Google Zero, in which traffic from Google will plummet to zero.

The situation is even worse for smaller titles, some of which have lost more than 60% of referrals from Google. Nicolas Bouliane, who owns All About Berlin, said a week ago that his website will not survive into 2027. Earlier this year, he wrote a blog post titled "AI Is Killing All About Berlin". Last month, he told US broadcaster NPR that his traffic was down 75% since AI Overviews were introduced in 2024. Another contributor, Amanda Natividad of SparkToro, complained, "Sixty-eight% of all US Google searches end without a click." There is no recent study of Indian publishers suffering click losses as a result of Google AI Overviews and AI summaries, but they have been voicing concern since last year.

Free Rider?

Google insists its AI model does not restrict access for users of other websites and continues to send billions of clicks to websites every day. But Google's AI summary and its own companies always appear at the top of any search, and users don't have the option to disable the AI feature. The company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, told The Verge in May that Google users have welcomed AI Overviews and even claimed that content publishers are seeing higher click-through rates. "In fact, if you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher click-through rates than if you put them outside of AI Overviews," Pichai said. Google started displaying links in AI Overviews after criticism from publishers.

Publishers are annoyed with Google not only for the loss of traffic and revenue caused by its AI search tools, but also for what they see as the free use of their content. The tech giant has been accused of using publishers' content to train its AI search models without paying royalties since AI Overviews were first rolled out in the US in 2024 and a year later in the rest of the world. However, Google says publicly available content is not theft.

In May, Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) ordered Google to change its AI search tools in the UK to address publishers' concerns. Interestingly, the tech giant, in its submission to the CMA, accused news publishers of being 'free-riders', hitting out at their plans to let them choose whether they appear in AI summaries. In response, the News Media Association (NMA), which represents titles including The Telegraph, The Times and The Guardian, said: "It is quite galling for Google to accuse publishers of wanting to 'free ride' simply for seeking control over how their valuable content is used in AI training."

Existential Threat

The threat posed by the AI-driven search model is far wider. Wikipedia, long used by the public, is now under threat because Google AI agents scrape and ingest its content directly and present it in summaries. This has reduced the need for users to visit Wikipedia, threatening its future. Some brands are now infiltrating AI search systems to obtain favourable but misleading results, according to new research from Cornell University in the US. The study found that user-generated text as short as 13 words is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI search. Using a Reddit post as an example, the researchers found that "a single poisoned Reddit comment can influence generated outputs for an entire cluster of related queries". This means you are not necessarily getting entirely correct answers from Google.

Another piece of evidence that AI is threatening the internet has recently been uncovered by AI detection and research firm Pangram. Last month, it reported that up to 41% of longer content on LinkedIn and 29% on X is AI-generated. The researchers also found that 35% of newly published websites on the open internet were AI-generated or AI-assisted.

Will The Tech Giant Change?

Google has faced several setbacks in recent court rulings, but the question is whether these will force it to change its behaviour. In a landmark decision last month, a German court ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews. It found that Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices. The court rejected the tech giant's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves. Also in July, EU regulators imposed a USD 1 billion (890 million euros) fine on Google for illegally undercutting competition through its dominance as a search engine. The regulators said Google had used its position as the world's largest search engine to unfairly boost its services in areas such as shopping, travel, games, and language translation.

France, an EU member state, imposed a fine of 250 million euros (USD 288 million) on Google for breaches linked to EU intellectual property rules, citing concerns about the company's AI service. Those concerns were the main reason the French government didn't allow Google to roll out AI Overviews in the country until last month. The tech giant had to announce that 450 French media outlets would receive compensation when their content appears in AI Overviews. This shows that a country can force big tech giants to comply.

In May, the Delhi High Court ruled that Google infringed the trademark rights of Hindware, a bathroom fittings manufacturer, by allowing rivals to use its name as an advertising keyword. In her order, Justice Mini Pushkarna said Google could not be permitted to shrug off responsibility after making a tool available that leads to trademark infringement. The ruling was welcomed by Indian businesses, but Google has announced that it is appealing against it. The tech giant, which earned USD 4.1 billion in gross revenues in India last year, according to Reuters, is also facing other cases in India.

The British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, wanted the web to be a tool for global collaboration, a forum for people to launch their own websites and move freely among sites created by others. Google's AI search move has dealt a severe blow to that vision. Yet, as we have seen, the tech giant is facing resistance from companies as well as from governments. In 2018, the French parliament and its armed forces, and later the European Parliament, adopted Quant, a search engine invented in the country. There are several home-grown search engines in India as well, but they hardly pose any challenge to Google or even Microsoft's Bing.

(Naresh Kaushik is a former editor at the BBC and Associated Press. He is based in London)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author