Own a website? Well, Google’s new unassuming AI mode may just kill your organic search traffic.
If you use Google, you may have noticed a small unassuming “AI Mode” tab right next to your search options. What’s in this tab may just kill all of your favorite websites.
This past May, Google unveiled its end-to-end AI search experience. Send it a question and it’ll break it down, researching dozens of sites within a few seconds, giving you a short report tailored to your question.
AI Mode uses the Gemini 2.5 model under the hood, both for AI mode and the AI overview you already see at the top of normal searches. To search the web for your prompt, it uses a ‘query fan-out’ technique, which breaks your query up into a bunch of subtopics which are then individually searched and reviewed by the AI.
I did a few test searches, asking it to give me an outlook of how many people search using AI. It searched over a 100 sites and put together a few paragraphs.
Google is also planning a number of new features:
Being able to “video chat” the AI about something you’re doing in the real world and get feedback in real-time using your camera.
Running an AI assistant to purchase ticket and book reservations
Pulling in data from your Gmail and Google apps to give you recommendations based on your history
With 90% of all global search in the hands of Google, a situation engineered by Google’s control of the mobile and browser ecosystems - we’re about to get hit with another “network blast”.
We can define network blast to describe when an entity with a majority market share rolls out a feature that their users are automatically enrolled in or exposed to, leading to that feature gaining a ton of momentum, regardless if its good or not.
Previous example of this are the contract tracing systems that Google and Apple rolled out, and mobile payments like Google and Apple pay. Within a few years of their network blasts, Google and Apple pay became half of all digital payments.
And we’re already seeing significant declines in search over the past year. The first version of Google’s AI search (AI Overviews) which sat at the top of user’s searches resulted in 30% decrease in clicks to search results. And we should expect this to increase as Google’s AI search gets better.
And with this blast of AI search comes all of the negative consequences:
Search traffic will nosedive, this could kill a large portion of websites - big and small.
The AI will be biased towards the most authoritative websites, leading to AI generated results that parrot the information and headlines
A network blast will trigger other tech companies to ‘follow the leader’ and we will see AI assisted search in alternative search engines
Big tech companies will continue to gain more surveillance and control capabilities, being able to influence searchers with a spin on their prompts, and promote their partners while silencing alternative viewpoints
Most dangerous of all - People’s ability to search and reason will continue to atrophy, AI will do all thinking for them
Right now, AI mode is its own separate feature, but Google says they will incorporate these into the core search experience over time like the AI overview.
The cruel irony is that this AI search is going to kill the millions of websites it scraped content from.
For those who want to think for themselves, keep the ability to search and reason through different sources of information, and stay free of influence from big tech AI models - look to use alternative search engines.
Currently I recommend SearxNG, this is a meta-search engine that sends your searches to multiple search engines, and returns the results while protecting your privacy.
We run a professional SearxNG instance without logs as part of Above Suite, our collection of privacy services.
Keep searching for truth.
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