{"slug": "if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot", "title": "If You’re Reading This, You’re Probably an AI Bot", "summary": "More than 50% of internet traffic is now non-human, according to a Cloudflare report, as Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode reduce clicks to external websites. A Growth Memo study found 75% of users stay in AI Mode rather than switching to the web, threatening the ad-supported business model of the open web. Google disputes the findings, calling the study unrepresentative and noting new features that show web results in AI Mode.", "body_md": "AI is a threat to all websites. Internet users Googling for information historically had to click links and read webpages. Webpages have ads, and ad money allows writers to live in houses and feed our—I mean *their*—children.\n\nAs the [New York Times points out](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open-web.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zFA.7A4y.kcG9Q_Hnu0C-&smid=bs-share) in a fresh report, Google results are directing more and more people to…Google, and that’s it. Generally, there’s an AI Overview at the top of a results page for any given informational search, and perhaps that’s enough for many queries. But a study from Growth Memo referenced by the Times says [75% of people ](https://www.growth-memo.com/p/what-our-ai-mode-user-behavior-study)who find themselves using AI Mode, *stay in AI mode* rather than switching to the web. And if you’re in AI Mode, that means you’re just hanging out chatting with the bot while Google’s AI agents flit around trying to answer your question.\n\nBut the point is that whether users tend to stop at the AI Overview, or engage with it and end up in AI Mode, “more than 50% of traffic on the Internet is now non-human,” a [Cloudflare report from earlier this month](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) says. As less and less human traffic comes from Google Search, and more and more ads are being shown to bots, the danger is that the business model of a free and open web will become unsustainable.\n\nAfter all, a study from earlier this year found that [over 35% of new websites were AI generated](https://gizmodo.com/dead-internet-theory-is-17-of-the-way-to-becoming-reality-study-finds-2000751718). It turns out they’re also, apparently, more than 50% AI-consumed.\n\nGoogle, for its part, [claimed about a year ago](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-search-driving-more-queries-higher-quality-clicks/) in a blog post that search traffic is still strong actually, and that claims otherwise are “often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search.” A representative reached by the Times also pointed out that there are new features in the Google Search’s AI Mode that show relevant web results, apparently in an effort to push users back to the web.\n\nWhen reached for comment, a Google spokesperson told Gizmodo that the study showing that 75% of users stayed in AI Mode was unrepresentative, saying “participants were given forced, unnatural tasks that likely influenced their behavior (e.g. being explicitly told to click out in 2 out of the 7 tasks),” and this “was not a representative sample of user queries or behavior.”\n\nJust anecdotally, if you’re like me, organic AI Mode interactions happen more like this:\n\nEarlier today, when I saw that Andy Burnham had [officially ascended](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/20/world/uk-prime-minister-burnham-starmer) to the office of Prime Minister of the U.K., a stupid but distracting question jumped into my head: has there ever been a head of a government who went by Andy before?\n\nThis is a nightmare to Google the old fashioned way. Try it yourself and you’ll run into a ton of problems. First, Google gets too clever by half and feeds you all kinds of results about notable presidents named Andrew who nonetheless didn’t go by Andy. So you then start putting in queries in quotation marks like “president Andy,” [which is a CB radio](https://www.walcottradio.com/president-andy-compact-12-and-24-volt-cb-radio-with-large-lcd-screen-p-3519.html), or “prime minister Andy”—and if you’re cool enough, [you already know what the result for that one is going to be](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DHwfIVHPX8E/).\n\nWhen that strategy doesn’t work, you’ll try to find some kind of list of all kings, presidents, prime ministers, etc. named Andrew, past and present, with a plan to then cross-reference all those Andrews for search results where someone calls them Andy, but no such list apparently exists in the first place. This is getting complicated.\n\nOr guess what: you can just Google it—as in put it into the new, AI-addled Google. And like magic you will get results, like this one, saying there’s someone named Andrew Rajoelina, who is President of Madagascar, and goes by Andy.\n\nOr this one, saying the Jamaican Prime Minister is Andrew “Andy” Holness,” and that there was also someone named Andy Clendennen who was Chief Minister of Montserrat.\n\nAnd while these results are fast, and much easier to produce than the research project described above, they are all dead wrong. The president of Madagascar is named *Andry* Rajoelina, with an r; the prime minister of Jamaica, Andrew Holness doesn’t go by Andy, and never has; and Andy Clendennen isn’t in any record of leaders of Montserrat, so that’s just a completely made up guy.\n\nIt’s when I persist, and I do, time and again, out of sheer annoyance, that I end up shifting into AI Mode:\n\nWhen I pushed back, the AI told me I was “entirely correct,” and said, “I apologize for providing completely incorrect information in my last response.” It then revises its answer about Andys, claiming “the answer is actually none.” (And who knows if this is even correct. If you have the answer to my dumb question about people named Andy, please sound off in the comments.)\n\nThe same Google spokesperson said, “On accuracy in our Search AI features, we rigorously test the quality of our AI features using statistically significant samples of representative user queries. Responses are accurate the vast majority of the time, and when we get it wrong, we use those examples to help inform ongoing improvements to our systems.”\n\nThis statement is similar to something Google’s representatives [have been saying for years](https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-overviews-at-6-months-are-they-better): essentially that Google focuses on improving the user experiences at the center of the bell curve, not the edges.\n\nMy reactions to AI Overviews aren’t always pushback against outright hallucinations, but negativity often steers me into AI Mode. As others have noticed before me, [such as Mashable’s Chris Taylor](https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-overviews-2025-review), AI Mode seems to just be better at answering questions than AI Overviews. The chatbot-like user experience of AI Mode seems to be tuned for longer answers and ambiguity, while AI Overviews seem to prefer being punchy, even at the cost of being wrong. Thus, the AI Overview’s overconfidence is the gateway to an interaction with AI Mode.\n\nBut this is apparently how people use Google these days. The Times report notes that according to something Google itself said in May at its developer conference, instead of writing brief, keyword-stuffed queries in order to find a webpage to read, apparently Google users now write *three times as much text*—something more akin to an AI prompt.\n\nThis experience is what seems to slowly be replacing the ad-supported open web. Once upon a time, you could be curious about an obscure piece of information, but get no answer from Google. You might just have to hope someone else would go to a library eventually to get to the bottom of it, and perhaps years from now, the fruits of their labor would be an article that shows up in a Google Search result.\n\nNow, it sounds like our search results are transforming into impatient demands directed at a bot. We’re no longer saying, “Has someone written something about this?” We’re saying “I bet someone has written about this. Go read it for me.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot", "canonical_source": "https://gizmodo.com/if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot-2000788073", "published_at": "2026-07-21 09:30:27+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-21 10:00:47.229982+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-products", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Google", "Cloudflare", "Growth Memo", "New York Times", "Gizmodo", "Andy Burnham"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/if-youre-reading-this-youre-probably-an-ai-bot.jsonld"}}