It used to be fairly simple – create useful content, answer people’s questions, build authority and optimise for search.
Keep publishing, they said, and Google would send readers your way. For years, it was a straight foward simple bargain that was given to publishers.
I have already used the word “simple” twice, but it was never quite that simple, of course. Getting traffic from search has always been competitive, and publishers have spent years trying to understand Google’s constantly changing algorithms. But the basic idea remained that someone searches for information, Google points them towards websites and the website gets the reader.
But in this era of AI, that relationship is changing. Artificial intelligence is already transforming how people search for information and Google is right in the middle of that transformation. Instead of simply giving users a page of links to explore, Google can increasingly answer questions directly through AI Overviews and its more conversational AI Mode.
For the person searching, this can be incredibly convenient. Ask a question, get an answer, ask a follow up, dig deeper and keep going without necessarily opening a single website.
For publishers, however, the rather uncomfortable question sitting underneath all this convenience is, if Google can answer the question without sending the reader to the website that created and reported the information, where does that leave publishers?
And perhaps more importantly, is this still a fair race?
Search is no longer just about finding websites
Google has used artificial intelligence in Search for years. AI has helped Google understand language, interpret queries, rank pages and figure out what users are actually looking for.
What is changing now is what happens after Google understands the question. Generative AI can take information from different sources, synthesise it and present an answer directly on the search results page. Google’s AI Overviews are already doing this, while AI Mode takes the experience further by allowing users to have a more conversational search experience.
Google has been very clear about where Search is heading. At its 2026 I/O event, the company said AI Mode had surpassed one billion monthly users and described Search as being reimagined around an AI powered search experience.
So the question is no longer whether Google is going to become more AI-driven, because It already is.
And then there is the disappearing click
This is where things get uncomfortable for anyone who makes a living, or even tries to make a living, publishing things on the internet. The traditional search journey was fairly straightforward. You had a question and searched it on Google. You saw a list of results, clicked on one and read the article. Maybe you clicked another page. Perhaps you saw an advert, signed up for a newsletter, followed the publication or eventually became a regular reader.
That click mattered.
Now imagine asking Google a question and getting a sufficiently good answer before you ever reach the publisher’s website.
Independent research is already showing signs of what this could mean. A Pew Research Center analysis of nearly 69,000 Google searches found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in only 8% of visits, compared with 15% when an AI summary was not present. Only 1% clicked a link within the AI-generated summary itself.
That is not a small shift, and for publishers, a search impression is not the same thing as a reader. A website does not pay its bills because Google knows it exists. It needs people to actually arrive.
But what about the people creating the information?
This is the part that worries me. Because AI search does not magically create the information it answers with. Somewhere behind the answer are journalists, researchers, bloggers, photographers, experts, publications and organisations that spent time producing the original information.
Someone had to write the article, someone had to investigate the story, another had to interview the expert.
Someone had to test the product, visit the destination, research the subject or spend hours making sense of complicated information.
The web that AI systems are learning from was built by people publishing information in the first place. So what happens if those publishers steadily lose the traffic that makes producing that information financially sustainable?
That is the uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of AI search. AI needs the web. But if AI search keeps users away from the web, what happens to the people who create it?
Even ranking first may not save you
For publishers, one of the most frightening parts of this shift is that traditional SEO success may no longer guarantee the same reward.
Mail Online, for example, reported that when AI Overviews appeared above its articles, click through rates fell by more than 50 percent, even when the publication ranked first.
Even the first placers stand no chance.
For years, publishers have been told to fight for that first position. We have learned about keywords, backlinks, domain authority, helpful content, search intent and technical SEO. We have optimised headlines and updated old articles. We have studied Search Console data and watched rankings rise and fall – Because the prize was the click.
But what happens when the search engine can take the information from the page that ranked first, summarise it and put the answer directly in front of the user?
Is Google itself the destination now?
Increasingly, it looks that way. Google’s argument is that AI is not killing Search or the web. The company has said that overall organic click volume from Search to websites remained relatively stable year over year in its 2025 analysis, while the average quality of clicks increased. Google also points to the billions of clicks it continues to send to websites.
While that is important context, publishers are looking at a different part of the equation: what happens to the clicks on the specific searches where Google answers the question itself?
And that is where the debate becomes much more complicated because perhaps Google is still sending billions of clicks, but is it sending enough of the right clicks to the publishers who depend on search traffic?
Can you turn AI off when you search?
This is also where the experience gets interesting for ordinary Google users. A surprisingly common question now is whether you can simply switch AI search off and go back to the old fashioned list of links.
At the moment, there is no straightforward permanent switch that removes every AI feature from Google Search. Users can, however, use Google’s Web filter to get a more traditional text based list of links rather than an AI Overview.
We are already at the point where people are asking how to get back to the version of Search they were using before AI became such a prominent part of it.
Is AI better than Google Search?
The honest answer is: sometimes. If you want a complicated question explained, need several pieces of information brought together or want to have a conversation about a subject, an AI-powered search experience can be remarkably useful.
But if you want to find a particular website, compare several opinions, read the original reporting, check a company’s own announcement or explore different sources for yourself, traditional search still has an important advantage because it gives you the sources.
And there is a difference between being given an answer and being given the information needed to make your own judgement.
So when is Google going fully AI?
There is unlikely to be one dramatic morning when Google switches off the old Search and announces that everything is now AI. The transition is already happening.
AI Overviews are part of Search. AI Mode is expanding. Google is adding increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities, including deeper research and conversational interactions. At the same time, traditional search results remain part of the experience.
And what does this mean for publishers?
For years, publishers have been told to build authority, write useful content and understand SEO. Answer the questions people are asking. Keep improving the website. It is exactly what many small publishers are doing.
Now the rules are changing while publishers are still playing. We are being asked to accept a rather strange new arrangement. An arrangement where you create the information, make it useful enough for an AI system to understand and then hope there is still a reason for the human being to click through and read it.
If that isn’t a difficult proposition, I don’t know what is.
Is AI Search a fair race for publishers?
Maybe that is the question we should be asking more loudly. And just for the record, this is not an argument against AI. AI search can be useful. It can make information easier to understand and help people navigate subjects that would previously have required several searches.
But convenience for the user cannot be the only measure of whether the system works. There also has to be an ecosystem underneath it.
If the people creating original information keep losing the traffic, revenue and audience generated by that information, the internet could eventually become very good at answering questions and increasingly bad at producing the original answers.
What happens to publishers when Google becomes the destination instead of the doorway? And who gets to decide whether that new race is actually fair?
