I'm worried a big Google change this year could kill my favorite websites

I've spent 20 years writing for websites. Most of them grew out of print magazines I used to work on. All of them try to inform, entertain and occasionally make you think. And yet right now, I'm watching Google prepare to pull the rug out from under all of us.

The tech giant is pushing something called AI Mode, and if the whispers are true, it'll soon become the default way millions search. That might sound convenient. But for people like me who create content, it's actually terrifying.

Here's what AI Mode does: instead of showing you a list of websites to click on, it simply answers your question itself. No links. No clicks. No reason to visit the sites that actually created the information Google's AI is regurgitating.

Logan Kilpatrick, a lead product manager at Google, posted on X that AI Mode would become the default "soon". Google walked that back slightly, but the direction of travel is unmistakable. After all, the search engine has already got over 100 million monthly users in AI Mode. The AI Mode tab now sits permanently on the left of search results, nudging users toward it. And they're adding more and more features that bypass normal search entirely.

So this isn't my paranoia. It's slowly, actually happening.

The brutal reality

Let me explain why this matters. Websites need visitors. Visitors come largely from Google. Visitors may then subscribe to that website, see ads on it, or buy things on it. And that money helps pay for the writers, editors, photographers, illustrators and developers who make the site worth visiting in the first place. Break that chain and the whole thing collapses.

AI Mode breaks that chain.

When Google answers a question directly, you don't click through to the source. The source gets nothing; no traffic, no ad revenue, no subscribers, no way to pay the bills. And unlike traditional search results, where publishers at least got a fighting chance at a click, AI Mode buries sources in citations nobody reads.

Search Engine Journal reports that organic traffic will "almost certainly decline" as answers stay within Google's ecosystem. They're not wrong. We're already seeing it with AI overviews; those AI-generated summaries that appear above search results. Now Google wants to make that the entire experience.

So what will the big, corporate websites – like those of national newspapers – do? Well, they'll be encouraged to pay for visibility through ads. Google made $264 billion from ads in 2024; they're not about to let that revenue stream dry up. So while they suffocate organic traffic, they'll happily sell you back the visibility you used to get for free.

What we'll lose

But what about the niche blogs that taught you to fix your vintage camera? The local news sites covering council meetings? The recipe bloggers, the tech explainers, the historians sharing primary sources? These sites can't afford to outbid major media outlets for ad space in AI mode. They'll simply vanish.

And what will we be left with? A web that's largely Google talking to itself, trained on content it no longer needs to send you to. A closed loop where one megacompany controls both the questions and the answers the world is asking.

The cruel irony is that Google's AI is only as good as the web it scrapes. If AI mode kills off the sites creating original content, what exactly will Google train its AI on in five years? Recycled AI slop? Other AI summaries? The system eats itself.

I don't want to sound melodramatic, but this feels existential. The web as we know it (chaotic, diverse, independently created) only works because there's an economic model, however imperfect, that supports it. Break that model and you break the web.

No one can't predict how fast that'll happen, of course. Things may stay the same for a while. It all may collapse overnight. I honestly have no clue. But either way, it's worth considering how this will affect you. Because we all rely on the free web. And yet soon, Google's AI may leave us with nothing but its silence.

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