The end of search ...

For years now, Google has been tweaking its search formula to prop up AI and bury actual links.
Now it’s rounding into its final form—and changing the internet forever.

In every nook and cranny of the internet, at each and every moment of the day, you can find someone complaining that their go-to product up and changed the formula. Maybe their perfume has stronger sandalwood overtones than it used to, or their local snack shack switched up the breading on its chicken strips, or a specific pair of yoga pants absolutely did not used to be this see-through during downward dog! (Sorry, everyone.) And sometimes the product in question involves the basic nuts and bolts of the internet itself. By which I mean: Google used to be better, man.

You don’t have to take that last one from a terminally online weirdo like me. There are plenty of serious businesspeople out there, with money and key performance indicators on the line, who would agree
that lately, when it comes to the internet’s biggest and most powerful search engine, the formula has definitely changed.

Like Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, who admitted on the tech news web show TBPN in May that his elite publishing house was already preparing for the worst when it came to the future of inbound traffic referrals from Google. “Last year, I told our teams: Assume there’s no search,” Lynch told the hosts. “You have to have your businesses planned as if search is zero.” He wasn’t alone in his proactive pessimism. Mike Reed, the CEO of USA Today, shared recently on the Rebooting Show podcast that at his company, “our plan is to assume search is gone and build our business in other ways.” Drastic times call for drastic projections, and as Reed phrased it in his interview, more than once: “The traditional Google Search model is broken.” 

For the better part of the 21st century, for better and for worse, that traditional Google Search model was the engine of the internet, the cause of and solution to so many online delights and problems. Google hoovered up content, websites picked up traffic, and users got pages of search results that ranged from salient to spammy but were mostly straightforward enough to parse. In recent years, though, this status quo has been undergoing a significant change—one involving, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. 

Come to think of it, when I type in Beyond Real Time on an Android phone, tons of crapola comes up referring to any URL having the words Beyond Real Time. Absolutely useless. You want to kill business? Kill traditional search.
For twenty years, the internet operated on a basic exchange: creators provided the product
and (Google) provided the traffic.

But as companies like Google became desperate to feed their Large Language Models, that exchange broke.
AI agents, like Spark, don't route traffic; they consume it. They use pattern recognition to scrape the semantic value
of a website, compress it into a generated summary, and present it directly to the user. 

They cut the outbound link. Google's no longer the switchboard operator; it's a closed loop, hoarding the data and refusing to pay the energetic cost of sending users to the actual source.

End result, enshitification

As per the article, the formula has changed and the product is failing.

Because search is now optimized to feed the AI rather than the user, the quality of search results has plummeted into "enshittification." The system is choking on its own fumes. The AI promotes SEO garbage and AI-hallucinated noise over actual human intuition, rendering standard search functionally useless for finding ground truth.

This phenomenon of appropriate ad content, keyed to the user, was identical to those seen in Minority Report. Now, with AI replacing searches 24/7 with summaries, the notion of AI killing off business keyed to search is akin to killing off Google's golden goose in real time.