When Google co-founder Larry Page outlined the company’s mission prior to its 2004 public offering, he emphasized providing open, free, and unbiased access to high-quality information on the internet. For years, Google fulfilled this role by directing users to a wide array of websites across the open web, spanning publishers, merchants, universities, and more. However, recent developments suggest that Google’s approach to search is shifting significantly amid the rise of artificial intelligence, raising concerns about the future of the open web.

Since 2023, Google has integrated artificial intelligence into its search platform through the introduction of AI Mode, which replaces traditional lists of hyperlinks with conversational responses generated by Gemini, its AI chatbot. The company also updated its search interface to accept multimedia queries and introduced AI “agents” that can perform searches on users’ behalf. These innovations have led to increased engagement: Google reports users are submitting three times longer queries and spending significantly more time interacting with search results in AI Mode compared to traditional searches. Independent studies have found that in approximately 75 percent of sessions, users remained within AI Mode rather than navigating to external websites.

This shift has raised alarms among publishers, businesses, and other online content providers who have historically depended on Google to drive traffic to their sites. Nilay Patel, editor in chief of the technology website The Verge, warns that a phenomenon he calls “Google Zero,” in which traffic from Google plummets, has effectively arrived. Users increasingly rely on AI-generated answers within Google, bypassing external sources altogether, which threatens the web’s open ecosystem.

The transformation has sparked debate about the long-term implications for the internet. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has noted in a recent essay that the web's original vision as an open, borderless platform is being eroded by closed ecosystems—so-called “walled gardens”—and that AI is accelerating this trend. While companies like Apple and Meta have established such environments, Google’s AI-powered search now similarly raises the risk of confining users within a curated digital environment.

Google counters that it remains committed to the health of the web ecosystem. In an August 2023 blog post, Liz Reid, vice president of search, said reports of declining click-through traffic were based on flawed data and that the company continues to generate billions of website visits. Google has also introduced features designed to encourage users to explore content outside AI Mode, such as website previews and options for users to prioritize preferred news sources. A company spokesperson emphasized that Google’s AI features still "drive significant traffic to websites" and criticized studies citing increased user retention within AI Mode as methodologically limited.

Nonetheless, data from independent observers paint a more complex picture. Content delivery network Cloudflare reported that over half of web traffic is now nonhuman, and human visits to websites in sectors such as finance, publishing, and retail have dropped nearly 40 percent in less than a year. This shift suggests that AI chatbots increasingly answer queries by aggregating information without sending users directly to source websites. Wikipedia, managed by the Wikimedia Foundation, has also observed an 8 percent decrease in human visitors year-over-year, even as AI models scrape its content for training data. To address this, Wikimedia has begun charging AI companies for access and is promoting its own channels to maintain reader connections.

In response to these developments, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently mandated changes to Google’s AI search. The regulator requires the company to provide clear source attributions in chatbot responses, allow website operators to opt out of AI summarization, and implement these changes globally—measures aimed at preserving traffic to content creators.

While some experts, including Tori Noble of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that Google’s AI search still facilitates access to the broader internet and is not a fully closed ecosystem like certain social media platforms, the concerns remain acute for many content providers. Vox Media, owner of The Verge, recently sold a significant portion of its portfolio, citing a steep decline in search-driven traffic as a contributing factor.

As AI increasingly reshapes how information is accessed online, the ongoing tension between innovation and maintaining an open web ecosystem poses critical questions for the future of the internet and its many stakeholders.