Google’s annual I/O conference made one thing blisteringly clear: the company is no longer a search engine that points you elsewhere. It’s a destination determined to trap you. As El Reg’s Tom Claburn put it, the new AI-ified experience feels less like a helpful librarian and more like a ‘tar pit.’ You show up looking for a fact and end up stuck in a walled garden of AI Overviews and a new ‘AI Mode’ tab that leans heavily on the Knowledge Graph, often obscuring the original sources behind tiny citation chips.
The shift is aggressive. Longer, more complex queries will now be silently handed off to AI models, with Google betting that its summaries are good enough to replace the open web’s patchwork of links. There’s a jarring dissonance here. The company slaps a disclaimer on these overviews—essentially a ‘good luck, verify this yourself’ note—while simultaneously burying the very links you’d need to do that verification. It’s a move that fundamentally rewrites the bargain users have had with Google for 25 years: you give us traffic, we give you answers and send you on your way.
What makes this feel less like innovation and more like a land grab is the economics. Pushing AI-generated answers isn’t just about utility; it’s about keeping eyeballs on Google’s own pages, where it can stuff AI-generated ads into AI-generated responses. Combine that with the company’s recent pattern of shuttering open-source developer tools while heavily promoting closed-source Gemini alternatives, and a pattern emerges. Google isn’t just building a better mousetrap—it’s trying to pave over the entire field.
For publishers and users alike, the message is unnerving. The blue links aren’t technically dead, but they’re being systematically buried under a layer of probabilistic text. The real question isn’t whether AI search is impressive—it often is. It’s whether this strategy, which treats the open web as raw material to be strip-mined rather than a partner, will finally be the overreach that cracks Google’s dominance. A lot of people calling foul this week seem to think that moment has arrived.
