"I don’t doubt that Google has been thinking about this stuff for a while and that there are people at the company who deem it strategically irrelevant or at least of secondary importance to winning the AI race — the fate of the web might not sound terribly important when your bosses are talking nonstop about cashing out its accumulated data and expertise for AGI. I also don’t want to be precious about the web as it actually exists in 2025, nor do I suggest that websites working with or near companies like Meta and Google should have expected anything but temporary, incidental alignment with their businesses.
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But I also don’t want to assume Google knows exactly how this stuff will play out for Google, much less what it will actually mean for millions of websites, and their visitors, if Google stops sending as many people beyond its results pages. Google’s push into productizing generative AI is substantially fear-driven, faith-based, and informed by the actions of competitors that are far less invested in and dependent on the vast collection of behaviors — websites full of content authentic and inauthentic, volunteer and commercial, social and antisocial, archival and up-to-date — that make up what’s left of the web and have far less to lose. Maybe, in a few years, a fresh economy will grow around the new behaviors produced by searchlike AI tools; perhaps companies like OpenAI and Google will sign a bunch more licensing deals; conceivably, this style of search automation simply collapses the marketplace supported by search, leveraging training based on years of scraped data to do more with less. In any case, the signals from Google — despite its unconvincing suggestions to the contrary — are clear: It’ll do anything to win the AI race. If that means burying the web, then so be it."
#Google #AI #GenerativeAI #AISearch #OpenWeb #AdTech #AdTargeting #OpenAI #News #Media
