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.
“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.
Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It 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. In 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.
Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.
Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most 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 A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.
The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever.
Users 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. People 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. One October study from Growth Memo, a newsletter focused on search and marketing, found that in about 75 percent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web.
For 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 A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.
Nilay Patel, the 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.
“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.”
The changes threaten the open web and show how rapidly A.I. has upended the technology landscape. Tim 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.
Much 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. Now A.I. has indisputably accelerated that trajectory, Mr. Berners-Lee said in a 2024 essay.
Tech companies have built empires that locked users in and were focused on maximizing profit instead of enhancing public utility, Mr. Berners-Lee wrote. “The rapid advancement of A.I. has exacerbated these concerns,” he added, “proving that issues on the web are not isolated but rather deeply intertwined with emerging technologies.”
Google has denied that it is endangering the open web. In a blog post last August, 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. Reports of a decline in search traffic were “inaccurate” and relied on “flawed methodologies,” she said.
“We care passionately — perhaps more than any other company — about the health of the web ecosystem,” Ms. Reid said.
Since publishing that blog post, Google has added more A.I. to search. It 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 A.I. refers to their favorite news outlets more frequently. The company also created a profile that helps publishers and creators promote their work in search.
“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 spokesman said in a statement, adding that the company’s A.I. features highlight links to the web.
Even so, searches are increasingly being performed by A.I. chatbots while the number of people visiting websites is falling, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company. While 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.
In total, more than 50 percent of web traffic is now nonhuman, Cloudflare said. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 percent, it added.
The 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.
Google’s A.I., along with other popular chatbots, have hit Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the online encyclopedia, said it had experienced an 8 percent decline in human visitors to its site over the past year. At the same time, it has seen an increase in bots scraping its site for data to train A.I. models.
“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.
Wikipedia 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 A.I. firms for access to its data for training.
Last month, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority mandated that Google change its A.I. search tools in the United Kingdom to address publishers’ concerns. The regulator said Google must include clear links to attribute content in chatbot responses, a move intended to help send traffic to websites. The company is also required to allow website operators to opt out of having their content appear in A.I. summaries, and is making the changes across search globally.
For some open web proponents, the fact that people can leave Google’s ecosystem remains enough.
“Whether it uses a traditional search method or A.I., I think Google is still facilitating access to the open internet,” said Tori Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on defending civil liberties online. “It’s not a closed universe” compared with walled gardens like Facebook, which requires a login for access, she added.
That’s little comfort to some website operators.
In May, Vox Media, which owns The Verge and other publications, began selling some of its sites. Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s chief executive, said the “decimation of search traffic” had influenced his decision to sell about half of the company to James Murdoch. In June, The Verge and several other Vox Media websites were sold to Penske Media.
Google has often said it was “sending out more traffic and the web is bigger than ever,” Mr. Patel said. “And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.”
Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.
