But as Google leans into AI for literally everything it does, including search results, the millions of bloggers, publishers and content creators who depend on Google referrals to pay their bills are now panicking. Google’s AI initiatives don’t feel like an upgrade. They feel like a nail in the coffin.
At its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai introduced a “reimagined” Search box — what Google called its biggest upgrade in 25 years — that now accepts text, images, files, video and open Chrome tabs, alongside a fleet of autonomous “information agents” powered by its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model that can monitor the web 24/7 and deliver synthesized answers without users ever needing to type a follow-up question.
Most crucially, AI Mode — the conversational interface that bypasses the traditional list of ranked blue links — is now a core part of the Search experience. Google says AI Mode has crossed one billion monthly users. Now, that number is only expected to grow.
In a statement to Moneywise, Google says users will “continue to see blue web links in the results, in addition to AI responses, and AI Mode is not the default experience in Search.” So you’ll still see a typical Search results page if you use traditional search or perform a visual search with Lens, but if your results do include an AI overview, you can choose to follow up on those results in AI Mode.
Google leans into AI Mode
It’s been a long time coming. AI Overviews, launched in May 2024, turned the prime real estate in Google — the top of the search results page — into a closed-off box that attempted to answer users’ questions while pushing results from more typical publishers lower down the page. In Search, you can now choose AI Mode from the start, or hit the “plus” icon to do an AI Search with “rich input or advanced tools,” according to Google.
A Pew Research Center study of 900 U.S. adults found that users who encountered an AI summary clicked a traditional search result just 8% of the time, compared with 15% without one.
Publishers have responded in various ways. Penske Media Corp., publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, filed a 101-page antitrust suit against Google in September 2025 alleging the company of “cannibalizing” publisher traffic.
Business Insider laid off 21% of its workforce in May 2025, with CEO Barbara Peng telling staff the company needed to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”
The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson has told employees to plan for Google traffic dropping “toward zero,” telling The Wall Street Journal that “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.”
