The big publishers were the first to really reject the "Links" page. If it's not a link to our content, or the content of our sister publications, then why should we include it? Instead, they threw their resources into optimizing their placement on search engines. This took the "web" and turned it closer towards a hub-and-spoke system, as smaller sites withered and died.

Now, people have found a way to retrieve various pieces of information they're looking for that doesn't involve a search engine. It may not be perfect (gluey pizza, anyone?) but objectively, it's certainly more efficient than a list of places that have used the same words that a person is searching for, and honestly probably at least "nearly-as" reliable as said list, because the average Joe Sixpack always has, and always will, be a lot better at asking a question and getting an answer than he will be at finding an answer to his question within the confines of a larger story.

This devastates the large publishers' traffic.

I'd come up with a conclusion here, but I'm too distracted wondering where I placed my violin. It's really small, it could probably be anywhere...

- If they don't make search AI centric, they're going to get lapped by AI-first competitors like Perplexity, OpenAI, etc. We saw many people here predict Google's pending demise from this. - If they do make search centric, they're unfairly consuming they world's content and hoarding the user traffic to themselves.

Since no reasonable company is just going to stand by and willing let itself be obsoleted, Google's obviously going to go for option 2. But had they for some reason stood down, then they would have been supplanted by an AI competitor and the headline would read "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Perplexity" - just a few years later.

They broke search by prioritising ads, then trusting the wrong, big publishers (eg every listacle from a big media network), broke their advanced search controls (domain blacklists, quotes that mean quotes, plus-and-minuses to alter things).

Then they added their own LLM's analysis to searches, admitting that that their SERPs are dead. They were in this death-spiral well before LLMs became an alternative. I won't pretend that SEO wasn't making traditional search untenable, but the vector Google chose will make their key product obsolete.

The thing I worry about is what they'll do to retain revenue. They have knowledge systems that cater to a lot more than what we normally search on. They have address data, know where people physically are right now, have live communication data on billions of users, know their shopping habits, and a thousand etceteras. Meta too. They have communication data on billions of people. How are these older software companies going to monetise the data they've amassed in an age when they are getting close to being able to replicate personas, model actual human behaviours?

for those of you who search for news -- with or without an AI -- what are you searching for? So much of news is finding out the unknown, it seems unsearchable by nature? Or are you asking for updates to a specific, ongoing story?

Then again, this would be a great time for state-sponsored media, if we didn't have such an anti-intellectual assclown as president and the lacky congress/scotus.

One possible way this plays out is that attention and investment move towards proprietary ecosystems, with large AI companies being able to secure exclusive access to closed information sources while everyone else is reduced to getting what they can from a dwindling open Web.

Another possibility might be that new standards allow interoperability between AI agents and open content providers, including microtransactions between them, and creating a new marketplace for information.

https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...

This will work. It will allow the chatbot to provide up to the minute data and information from the source. It will allow the user to maintain context -- like a popup dialog allows the user to maintain visual context. And, it will incentivize content creators to curate and provide information and data as people will be visiting their websites.

If anyone thinks this might be a good idea also, I've already laid down the foundation approaching a browser extension side panel as a framework like Electron or Playwright and did the grunt work. [0]

I put the VSCode IPC and other core libraries into this project. The IPC is important because a browser extension with this use case requires looking at a browser as a distributed system of javascript processes that communicate a a dozen different ways

> Environments: Node.js main process, Node.js child process, Node.js worker thread, browser main thread (window), iframe, dedicated Web Worker, Shared Worker, Service Worker, AudioWorklet.

> Communication: fetch/XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket, RTCDataChannel, EventSource, BroadcastChannel, SharedArrayBuffer + Atomics, localStorage storage events, MessageChannel/MessagePort, postMessage/onmessage, Worker.postMessage/worker.onmessage, parentPort.postMessage/parentPort.on('message'), ChildProcess.send/process.on('message'), stdin/stdout streams.

and VSCode provides a protocol interface with only `onMessage` and `send` so I can define my own that are not provided creating a consistent API for communication.

Regardless, I have it working but it needs to be completely rewritten.

[0]https://github.com/adam-s/doomberg-terminal

Hard to say exactly how bad it’s getting right now. Lots of horror stories out there.

> When Dotdash merged with Meredith in 2021, Google search accounted for around 60% of the company’s traffic, Vogel said. Today, it is about one-third. Overall traffic is growing, thanks to efforts including newsletters and the MyRecipes recipe locker.

If traffic is up but percentage of that traffic from search is down, does that mean search traffic is down overall? Or does it mean that strategies to diversify their traffic sources are working as planned?

How exactly is this good for consumers?

My point is that a lot of publishers are what I call "low value". They're rent-seekers. They have easily obtained information, often user-generated, and their role is to gatekeep that and make you click just one more page to get a result because hey that's another slew of ads they can show you.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that LLMs steal. At the same time, we have to recognize that a lot of publishers are intentionally useless rent-seekers so it's hard for me to feel sorry for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZXwdRBxZ0U

It took a little longer than predicted, but “Googlezon” is finally happening, with or without Google and Amazon.

I now instruct chatgpt to search the web for me and I read the result, since it works. I also read the news directly from various newspapers that I subscribe to to make sure they actually get money.

Do you think AI can really replace all the value traditional news brings?

It seems like the market thinks Google will be just fine.

I've started using AI to summarise articles for me because the endless SEO fluff has gotten to completely unbearable levels.

If you publish an article with a sidetrack that's 8 pages long and completely irrelevant, don't get upset when I have some LLM summarize it to 3 bullet points instead. I'm not made of time, nor patience!

2. These chatbots must also be killing ad revenue on SERP pages. It's safe to assume these summaries are also reducing clicks on ad links just as they are reducing clicks on content links.

So not only did it steal my traffic, it elevated my random opinion to pseudo “official” truth.

Pay for your news.

Instead I get things like this:

“Modern fathers have failed”

“Man need to ditch the dadbod”

“Equality means only man should be drafted”

They have tons of great and deeply investigated content, but they throw engagement bait into your face. In the end I use a search engine to extract a relevant subset of articles.

They made Search worse so people have to resort to AI chatbots.

I don't doubt that the shift from web searches to automated information extraction will pose new challenges to websites that rely on search engine optimization to drive new user traffic, especially for small/individual operators, and I'll be happy to witness the death of SEO if it comes to that, but blaming a new Google Search feature[2] for a long-running decline in traffic to online newspapers strikes me as a deflection from the slow death of their business model.

P.S.: Google's AI Overviews are fairly respectful of content providers and link back to source material from the generated text.

[1] https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-abandoning-news...

[2] The current title of the article is "News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools"

Very disappointing for WSJ.

There's also a problem around trust in journalists being tremendously low.

If it helps to annihilate the « news » sites that depended over advertisement to be profitable, that’s great.

Advertisement and journalism should never have been in the same sentence, no one can provide full independent news when you’re at the mercy of advertiser threatening to bail out if you say something bad on them.

We can always ask ourselves: What is more important for our society: independent media or our search overlords?