{"slug": "google-is-building-an-ai-fence-around-the-internet-it-once-championed", "title": "Google is building an AI fence around the internet it once championed", "summary": "Google's AI-powered search overhaul, including AI Mode and Gemini chatbot responses, is reducing traffic to external websites, with one study finding users never left AI Mode in 75% of sessions. The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel said 'Google Zero is already here' for publishers, while Tim Berners-Lee warned AI has accelerated the web's shift toward walled gardens. Google has denied endangering the open web.", "body_md": "# Google is building an AI fence around the internet it once championed\n\nThe Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with AI, impacting those who rely on it to funnel users to their website\n\n[SAN FRANCISCO] When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world.\n\n“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Page said.\n\nGoogle fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet.\n\nIt answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” – the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others – for more information.\n\nIn the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.\n\nNow in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web – and may be imperiling it.\n\nSince 2025, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with AI.\n\nIt introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its AI chatbot.\n\nMost recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign AI “agents” to run searches for them.\n\nThe effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever.\n\nUsers are writing queries three times as long as the keyword-heavy questions they asked of traditional searches, Google said at its developer conference in May.\n\nPeople are spending one to nine more minutes in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches, according to three studies from researchers tallied by *The New York Times*.\n\nOne October study from Growth Memo, a newsletter focused on search and marketing, found that in about 75 per cent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web.\n\nFor publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated AI into search.\n\nGoogle’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its AI-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites, and search traffic has dropped.\n\nNilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the technology website *The Verge*, has warned publishers for years that they would face “Google Zero”, a moment when traffic from Google would plummet to nothing.\n\n“For publishers, Google Zero is already here,” he said. “It wasn’t until AI Mode arrived that people could see that the slow creep was about to hit a tipping point.”\n\nThe changes threaten the open web and show how rapidly AI has upended the technology landscape.\n\nTim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, had envisioned the web as a tool for global collaboration without borders, where people could launch their own websites and flit freely among sites created by others.\n\nMuch of that vision has been chipped away over the years, as tech behemoths like Apple and Meta created “walled gardens”, or tech ecosystems where users could get almost everything they needed under one roof.\n\nNow AI has indisputably accelerated that trajectory, Berners-Lee said in a 2024 essay.\n\nTech companies have built empires that locked users in and were focused on maximising profit instead of enhancing public utility, Berners-Lee wrote.\n\n“The rapid advancement of AI has exacerbated these concerns,” he added, “proving that issues on the web are not isolated but rather deeply intertwined with emerging technologies”.\n\nGoogle has denied that it is endangering the open web.\n\nIn a blog post in August 2025, Liz Reid, a vice-president of search, said that the company’s ethos had not changed and that it was sending out a “relatively stable” number of clicks numbering in the billions.\n\nReports of a decline in search traffic were “inaccurate” and relied on “flawed methodologies”, she said.\n\n“We care passionately – perhaps more than any other company – about the health of the web ecosystem,” Reid said.\n\nSince publishing that blog post, Google has added more AI to search.\n\nIt also created some features intended to push users out of AI Mode and into the broader web, including previews of websites to some responses and a tool that lets people set “preferred sources” so that AI refers to their favourite news outlets more frequently.\n\nThe company also created a profile that helps publishers and creators promote their work in search.\n\n“Google’s AI Search features send billions of clicks to the web every week, meeting people’s evolving preferences for how they want to find information while driving significant traffic to websites,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the company’s AI features highlight links to the web.\n\nHe said the study that found that users stayed in AI Mode 75 per cent of the time was flawed because it relied on a small sample size and gave users specific tasks that did not reflect normal user behavior.\n\nEven so, searches are increasingly being performed by AI chatbots while the number of people visiting websites is falling, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company.\n\nWhile someone might once have Googled a soccer player’s World Cup performance and clicked to a sports site or a social media thread for commentary, a bot now crawls the web for that information and returns the player’s statistics to the user, who stays on Google.\n\nIn total, more than 50 per cent of web traffic is now non-human, Cloudflare said.\n\nBetween June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 per cent, it added.\n\nThe web’s fundamental economic model has changed, Cloudflare said, and chatbot-style search tools like Google’s could put the open web in peril if left unchecked.\n\nGoogle’s AI, along with other popular chatbots, have hit Wikipedia.\n\nThe Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the online encyclopedia, said it had experienced an 8 per cent decline in human visitors to its site over the past year.\n\nAt the same time, it has seen an increase in bots scraping its site for data to train AI models.\n\n“My work is to ensure that people don’t forget about us because Google’s user interface changed,” said Selena Deckelmann, the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer.\n\nWikipedia has started promoting its own app and social media channels to establish connections with readers outside Google’s ecosystem, she said. It also began charging Google and other AI firms for access to its data for training.\n\nIn June, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority mandated that Google change its AI search tools in the United Kingdom to address publishers’ concerns.\n\nThe regulator said Google must include clear links to attribute content in chatbot responses, a move intended to help send traffic to websites.\n\nThe company is also required to allow website operators to opt out of having their content appear in AI summaries and is making the changes across search globally.\n\nFor some open web proponents, the fact that people can leave Google’s ecosystem remains enough.\n\n“Whether it uses a traditional search method or AI, I think Google is still facilitating access to the open internet,” said Tori Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit focused on defending civil liberties online.\n\n“It’s not a closed universe” compared with walled gardens like Facebook, which requires a login for access, she added.\n\nThat is little comfort to some website operators.\n\nIn May, Vox Media, which owns *The Verge* and other publications, began selling some of its sites.\n\nJim Bankoff, Vox Media’s chief executive officer, said the “decimation of search traffic” had influenced his decision to sell about half of the company to James Murdoch.\n\nIn June, *The Verge* and several other Vox Media websites were sold to Penske Media.\n\nGoogle has often said it was “sending out more traffic and the web is bigger than ever”, Patel said. “And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.” THE NEW YORK TIMES\n\nDecoding Asia newsletter: your guide to navigating Asia in a new global order. 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Free.\n\nShare with us your feedback on BT's products and services", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/google-is-building-an-ai-fence-around-the-internet-it-once-championed", "canonical_source": "https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/startups-tech/technology/google-building-ai-fence-around-internet-it-once-championed", "published_at": "2026-07-24 03:37:15+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-24 03:53:23.062422+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Google", "Larry Page", "Gemini", "Nilay Patel", "The Verge", "Tim Berners-Lee", "Apple", "Meta"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/google-is-building-an-ai-fence-around-the-internet-it-once-championed", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/google-is-building-an-ai-fence-around-the-internet-it-once-championed.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/google-is-building-an-ai-fence-around-the-internet-it-once-championed.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/google-is-building-an-ai-fence-around-the-internet-it-once-championed.jsonld"}}