As intended.
First they're going to collapse the ad model by eliminating most clicks.
Then they're going to put all of the information they've been scraping from the now-bankrupt websites behind paywalls.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
(arstechnica.com)
Joke's on them, I've already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.
In all seriousness, it's becoming increasingly clear that we're eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it's already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I've heard countless terms and most of them aren't terribly accurate, but the web doesn't need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.
We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don't own it. We are it.
Very much yes.
I have this great visual image of the corporate web, marked by neon signs and billboards and holographic ads, populated entirely by bots talking to each other while the humans sneak away, giggling and shushing each other.
I see your ublock and raise you Pihole.
The internet has always had ads, some of the most obnoxious were those mid to late 90s banner ads with sound. I’ll never forget loading a random page and my speakers screaming: Helllllloooooooooo.
I genuinely forgot about the ads with sound.
I don't miss them.
Porque no los dos?
I've been wondering how we can build a new underground net that is just the internet of 2002, but with more bandwidth. Somewhere normies can't access easily and with a bad ui so they don't want to.
What kind of revisionist bullshit is this?
Like, it's almost always safe to write off anyone using "normies" but do you think 2002 was like in movies/TV?
"The net" wasn't some secret thing, kids had been using it in school for over a decade.
I can't tell if you weren't born then or already 50 years old...
But wherever you're getting your opinions on 2002 internet, it wasn't first hand
As a 50-something, I can see the case for putting the “golden age” of the internet between the birth of Wikipedia in 2001 and Facebook in 2006.
I’d expand it a bit further. Maybe 1999 to 2009. While Facebook did exist towards the end there, everyone’s grandmother wasn’t on it yet and they weren’t entirely intrusive and walled gardened. Forums still existed. Search engines still returned good results.
But it was the beginning of what would come. After 2009 it went downhill fast.
You're totally right
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It’s just nostalgia applied to the internet. Some people call it Eternal September. Everyone prefers what the internet was when they first discovered it and hate what it’s become since then. I remember the internet from 1996 most fondly. Many prefer it from the 80s or earlier 90s. This is no different from other media: music, TV, movies.
Of course this is separate from the real issue which is the consolidation and silo-ification of the modern web.
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Punch the Monkey, Shake the Tree, Bonzi Buddy, flash animation, sites that only worked in IE, etc, etc.
You're right, anyone who thinks 2002 was some golden age of the internet clearly wasn't there.
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Kagi has a “small web” filter that brings this back to an extent.
Marginalia.nu does too with similar additonal filters like Tildeverse and Forums.
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As intended.
Yes. The secret to telling what a search engine wants you to do is whatever is on top of the search results.
You and I might scour the results to find the exact best results, but most people simply look at the very first thing they're presented with and call it a day.
When I saw all of the search engines putting AI answers first, I knew they were intentionally trying to stop people from clicking through.
I'm not sure I fully understand the play here. Like, what's the grand vision? Fewer click-throughs == less ad impressions, no? They just want you to see the AdWords ads only? I'm not sure it's a fully-baked idea. I'm not convinced they can really create a moat around all information on the web
Would welcome any additional insights
It's to keep you on Google as long as possible. Google doesn't care about ad impressions off-site. Look at it this way:
You search for something and AI surfaces full answers to you at the top. Now, Google can "alter the deal" in the near-future where "sponsored AI results" come into play and are incorporated into The Answer. THAT is the gold mine. Right now (and forever) it's been about being on the first page of results and now it's about being the first result "above the fold" so people don't even need to scroll. This is going to change to be the "AI answer" so your website / product / service is mixed into the answer. Pay-for-play just like everything else.
This method will rapidly train users to just search, view AI results, then click through those paid results or move onto something else. Those AI incporated impressions will make Google money and the possible click-through from the AI answer will yield more money.
Companies are already working to optimize so AIs will recommend their products and services when people ask things like "I'm going on vacation to the mountains for a week. What gear would you recommend?"
Makes sense, thanks. I guess I just wasn't cynical enough to see it right away
Google probably wants to keep you on google.com, where they have ads. By doing the AI stuff, you never click through to someone else's page. They get 100% of the interactions and can sell all the clicks.
It's monopoly stuff. They should be stopped, with whatever box of liberty is needed.
Why would they do that, when they can charge advertisers to bias the LLM? How much do you think Adidas would pay to have their products advantages mixed into any response about sports gear, undetectable?
Search results are shit now.
Our only hope is this opens the door to some competitor, who'll provide actually useful search results. I know that would be very expensive to start.
For the longest time I didn't understand why people were saying Google search had gone to shit. Worked for me! Now it cancerous.
I can search for a YouTube video I know well, nada unless I go directly to YT. Google can't even find shit in their own space!
Kagi. Kagi is the answer. Been using it for 3-months and it's absolutely worth the $5 a month.
I'm at about half a year, and I thought for sure I'd be mixing in Google from time to time, but nope.
Same here. Never looked back. My search finally just works.
I want todays content in 2002 search engines.
What if content amount is the problem and old search algorithms simply do not scale well? (Pagerank algorithm has bunch of assumptions, are they still true/good enough?)
I’m not a programmer. Let me state it better though. I want the algorithms or lack thereof of the early 00s. I want to be able to search for something and get more than scrape sites and top 14, 17, or 22 lists. I want to be able to search for a businesses and contractors and get more than national chains with 800 numbers. If I type in electricians in city, state, I want it to actually do that instead of making me find a map app.
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Google pushed out competitors using partnerships only they could afford, then intentionally made search worse so people would see more ads.
Any hope this takes SEO out with it, or are we just going to get to a point of PR companies flooding AIs with data to benefit their clients?
The original Google algorithm was powered by establishing 'reputation' by the number of links to that page. Would be cool to see an algorithm that started with that analysis, but also weighed pages by their Erdős distance to your Fediverse account(think 6° of Kevin Bacon) - basically much higher scores for links from you, higher score for links by your friends, moderate boost for friends of friends, etc.
Enshittify search to the point of it being nearly useless. Then introduce a little bot to find it for you. Predictable.
Some websites now are really shit. Won't load unless you allow JavaScript from 15 different domains, cookie consent, terrible privacy etc.
If I want to know things like what 10 kmpl in mpg, I often use DDG snippets.
12ft.io would like a word. Makes the internet usable again.
I’ve googled several things recently, the AI shit really sucks! It’s fine if you’re looking for something basic, like translations of words and what not. But if it’s something more specific it’ll easily bullshit you and claim it’s correct.
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right i stopped using "search" that muddles my answers with LLM so how would they get my clicks, they lost the customer
I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
If you aren't paying, you're the product.
What sucks is that I can't unbundle their AI shit from my subscription
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Kagi is worth it though. Been paying for 3-months and the ability to search, get info, click through quickly is a breath of fresh air. It's what Google USED to be. Plus it downranks pages with excessive trackers, you can prefer or omit websites from results based on personal preference, and it'll even alert you when websites have paywalled answers. The Kagi free trial is all I needed to be convinced.
Ended up subscribing. Holy shit this is a gamechanger!
Crazy how good it is, right?
Google enshittified so gradually, we never even noticed.
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same actually, Kagi is pretty solid
This study isn't about total clicks, or a drop in traffic to Google caused by people not liking the ai overview. It's about for each Google search that was executed, how often did someone click on a link. Without ai it was 15% and with ai it is 8%. So if anything its proving the customers like the ai overviews and believe they are getting enough from them to answer their query.
Sure there are probably a couple people who see the overview at the top and hate ai so much they leave Google without clicking anything, but those people will probably only do that once or twice before they stop using Google entirely or disable the feature, and thus wouldn't count much in the data about ai overview searches.
so i have to flip them off harder somehow 🤔
I've switched to startpage and have no complaints. Not that Google has deployed much of its latest crap in Europe, but it's been shit for quite some time anyway.
One final nail in the open web coffin, just hammer it in there real good. RIP.
Looks like search will be dead soon.
Cloudflare makes me not want to use your site too
But they are making up for the lack of real visits by increasing their scrapping
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