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Google Just Killed Websites. It's Not Good.
Google Just Killed Websites. It's Not Good.
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Subtítulos (178)
0:00
Google isn't sending people to websites anymore. It's replacing them.
0:04
What looks like a search engine is increasingly a machine that reads the internet for you,
0:08
keeps the traffic, and leaves the original creators with nothing. The
0:12
open web is shrinking for the first time in its history. Search traffic is disappearing
0:16
at an alarming rate. This isn't a glitch.
0:19
Google is transforming from a gateway to the internet into a closed-loop answer
0:24
engine. One that may be starving the very websites it depends on.
0:28
And the consequences are terrifying. Chapter 1: The Ghost Town
0:32
Google search isn’t starting to just feel empty… it is empty. The internet as we know it is dying.
0:38
Experts predict that search volume will fall 25%. People are leaving the search box
0:43
for chatbots and AI helpers. In any other business, that would be called a crisis.
0:48
But that’s only part of the story. Analyst Rand Fishkin pulled real browsing
0:52
data from thousands of users. He found that 58.5% of U.S. Google searches now end in zero clicks.
0:59
People read the answer and never open the page. In Europe the number is even higher, at 59.7%.
1:06
For every 1,000 searches Americans type, only about 360 reach an external site. The rest stay
1:12
locked inside Google’s ecosystem. Close to 30% go to Google’s own sites, like YouTube and Maps.
1:19
The most used information tool on Earth now sends most people nowhere.
1:24
It has become a dead end. The writer Nilay Patel calls
1:27
this Google Zero. It is the point where a site's Google traffic falls to almost nothing. For years,
1:33
that was only a fear. Now it’s normal.
1:36
Behind those numbers are real people. It’s them who are feeling the effects.
1:40
One of them is Housefresh, a small British review site run by Danny Ashton. He bought
1:44
air purifiers and tested each one for efficiency and its running cost. Then he told readers which
1:50
ones were a scam. For months, his page ranked near the top for "best budget air purifiers."
1:56
Then came the Google update. The site lost about 91% of its Google
2:01
traffic. Years of reviews and consumer help vanished in one change. And the bigger brands
2:06
stepped in to take its place. Housefresh got buried.
2:09
It was not alone. Thousands of hobby blogs and small
2:12
independent companies vanished. Each of them knew something worth knowing and gave it away for free.
2:17
They suffered the same fate: a good year, an update, and then collapse.
2:22
The traffic didn’t move to a better source. It just stopped.
2:26
This wasn’t by chance. It was a conscious decision by the company that initially championed them.
2:31
Chapter 2: Code Red For 2 decades, Google had owned
2:34
the business of answering questions. It was where people turned to when they needed information.
2:39
“Google it” became part of everyday language. Then, in 2022, a startup in San Francisco
2:44
launched a tool called ChatGPT. Suddenly, a chatbot could answer you
2:48
right away. No list of blue links to dig through. Just the answer. According to The New York Times,
2:54
Google's leaders called an internal Code Red. Engineers were pulled off their projects. The
2:59
founders who had stepped away years earlier were pulled back into the building. The biggest name in
3:04
information had been caught off guard. The fear made sense.
3:08
The threat hit the one thing that made Google rich.
3:10
It was a simple process. You came to Google. Google sent you somewhere else. On your way out,
3:16
it sold an ad. The whole fortune rested on that single click. Google worked like
3:21
a tollbooth on a road it didn’t build. The more places it could send you, the more it earned.
3:25
Search ads are not a side business for Google. They are the engine and that engine sits inside
3:30
a company now worth about $2 trillion. Lose the search habit, and the whole thing begins to stall.
3:36
It’s an innovator's dilemma. To survive, you have to break the very thing that made you rich.
3:41
Google’s business depended on users leaving that search page. Users had
3:45
to go to the source. So it made a choice. To beat a chatbot, Google had to become one.
3:50
It would eat its own business model. It would keep the traffic it used to give away
3:55
and take the web's knowledge for free. And the people who wrote that knowledge would get nothing.
4:00
Chapter 3: The Window Shopper In 2023, Google tested a new
4:04
feature known as "Search Generative Experience." Then in May 2024, it launched as “AI Overviews”.
4:11
Users would ask a question and before any link loads, Google writes the answer in a box at the
4:15
top. It builds that answer from the websites listed below it. It provides the user with the
4:20
answer before they even glance down the page. It happens on the most banal searches. You
4:26
ask how to get a red wine stain out of the carpet. The steps are right there
4:29
at the top of the page. You never visit the cleaning blog that figured them out.
4:34
You got the answer. The blog got nothing.
4:36
But it’s not always right. When it first launched, it told people to put glue on
4:40
their pizza. It told another user to eat a small rock each day. Those lines came from old jokes
4:45
scraped from sites like Reddit. Google patched the worst ones fast, but the fact remained: the
4:50
AI takes the traffic whether it is right or wrong. The Pew Research Center ran a study in March 2025
4:56
tracking 900 American adults across nearly 69,000 searches. When an AI Overview appeared, clicks to
5:03
a normal site fell to 8%. Without the summary, that number was 15%. Overviews cut the chance
5:10
of a click almost in half. For the top result, outside studies show the drop can be worse still.
5:15
AI Overview keeps the traffic. The site gets nothing.
5:19
People rushed to Google’s defense. The Overviews list their sources,
5:23
the links are right there in the box. So surely the traffic still flows?
5:27
The same Pew study found that people clicked a link inside the AI summary just 1% of the time.
5:33
And it’s by design. Most Overviews point to 3 or more sources
5:37
at once. So each writer's credit shrinks to a footnote, while Google keeps the reader. It gets
5:43
worse for the smaller names. The links that do get clicked tend to go to Wikipedia, YouTube, and
5:48
Reddit. Government pages show up far more often than in normal results. News sites barely move. A
5:55
lone expert site rarely sees that traffic at all. The big names get bigger.
5:59
The small ones disappear. The damage doesn’t stop at
6:02
the missing click. After reading a summary, people were more likely to just close the
6:07
page. They ended the whole search 26% of the time. Without a summary, only 16% did.
6:13
Overviews effectively ends the user’s curiosity. It’s not a rare occurrence. At the time of the
6:18
study, about 1 in 5 Google searches showed a summary. For questions that start with who,
6:23
what, or why, the Overviews box showed up most of the time. Those are the exact
6:28
moments someone wants to learn. That’s exactly where the open
6:32
web is being shut out. Chapter 4: The Great Purge
6:36
Google's has stated publicly that its updates reward helpful content from real experts. It
6:41
says they bury thin, slop pages. That’s the promise.
6:45
The March 2024 update did something else. Across search after search, it pushed expertise down.
6:51
Forum threads floated up instead. Anonymous Reddit posts and Quora answers beat people who
6:56
had studied a topic for years. Type a health question, and a Reddit thread can sit above
7:01
sites built by doctors. Millions of hours of expert work slid off the first page within a
7:07
week. All because recognition beats knowledge. In simple money terms, a ranking is a paycheck.
7:12
The work that explained science, fixed gadgets, and tested products disappeared
7:17
because it wasn’t profitable enough for systems built to keep attention.
7:21
What filled the gap wasn’t necessarily better answers, but more engaging ones.
7:26
Confident guesses, often wrong, that read like expertise. Over time, tested explanations were
7:31
pushed down and forum-style speculation moved up. The official reason was quality. That wasn’t true.
7:38
Google had just found something it wanted more. Chapter 5: The $60 Million Enclosure
7:44
In February 2024, Google signed a deal with Reddit worth almost $60 million a year.
7:50
In the months surrounding that deal, Reddit's place in Google results exploded. Outside analysts
7:55
measured Reddit's search visibility jumping by over 1,300% between July 2023 and April 2024.
8:03
The number of Reddit pages ranking in Google nearly doubled, from about 22 million to 41
8:09
million. A site people used to actively avoid became one of the biggest winners on the page.
8:15
By some counts, it became the second most visited site from Google search in the country.
8:20
Only Wikipedia ranked higher. Reddit now pulls hundreds of millions of search clicks every month.
8:25
In return Google got a flood of conversations to train its AI.
8:29
Reddit was sitting on the largest amount on the open web. The very posts that trained its
8:33
models got pushed to the top of search. One payment bought the training data
8:38
and the front page at once. Then it got more insidious.
8:42
Reddit moved to block almost every other search engine from reading its pages. Google was the only
8:47
one left standing. Every single post and comment on Reddit got sealed off and handed the company
8:52
with the biggest checkbook. For a while.
8:55
Reddit later sold a similar deal to OpenAI for a reported $70 million.
8:59
For everyone outside the deal, this is eviction by another name. Small businesses or creators
9:05
can’t give Google a $60 million stream of data, so they’re left on the outside. The sites that
9:10
created the Reddit threads receive nothing in return, while the threads themselves rise
9:15
in visibility. A small blog does the original research, a Redditor links to it, and attention
9:20
flows elsewhere until the blog slowly dies. Essentially, access comes with a price.
9:25
Chapter 6: The $2 Billion Extinction Event Digital media company Raptive modeled the
9:31
impact of Google’s AI-generated summaries and estimated that publishers could lose around
9:36
$2 billion a year in ad revenue. Affected sites could see traffic fall 20 to 60%.
9:42
Those are numbers no business can survive. Not long after, Raptive’s innovation chief,
9:46
Marc McCollum, revised the numbers. He thought $2 billion was now on the low end.
9:51
It’s enough capital to collapse almost every major digital newsroom in the U.S. None of them have
9:56
large enough subscriptions to soften the blow. Local papers, investigative teams, and small niche
10:01
publishers get hit first. They don’t have the cushion to stop it. There’s no big subscription
10:06
base that can absorb that amount of losses. What makes it worse is that the cost of
10:11
doing the work doesn’t actually change. An investigation still takes months. Lab tests
10:16
still cost money. Reporting still means travel, time, legal review, all of it. But if the traffic
10:22
disappears, the funding disappears with it. AI searches now take away one of the last ways
10:27
these digital media teams earn money. This isn’t just an American problem.
10:32
In Germany, AI Overviews now pull hundreds of millions of clicks from publishers each month.
10:37
It is the same machine producing the same result, in every market Google runs in.
10:42
Google isn’t blind to any of this. It sees the traffic and reads the same
10:47
complaints everyone else does. Yet it keeps going. It’s a sacrifice the company is willing to make.
10:52
Chapter 7: The Innovator's Murder Google is not doing this out of hate or
10:57
stupidity. It is doing it out of fear of losing. It’s in a fight for its life.
11:01
Its rivals, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, are all racing to own how people get information.
11:07
OpenAI has ChatGPT. Microsoft has Copilot. Google's own answer is Gemini. It even
11:13
rolled out an AI Mode that replies in full conversations. Billions of dollars
11:17
and the future of the company ride on the result. The open web functioned like a partner in Google’s
11:23
ecosystem. Publishers created content, Google helped people find it, and traffic flowed back
11:28
to the source. Now that relationship has shifted. The web is less a partner than a feedstock. It’s
11:34
an endless supply of human-written material that can be absorbed and returned without sending
11:38
the reader anywhere. Destroying independent publishing isn’t necessarily the goal. It’s
11:44
the aftermath of pursuing something else. Google didn’t set out to kill the web.
11:48
They set out to compete. In August 2024, a federal
11:51
judge found Google had illegally held a monopoly over search. The penalties were soft.
11:57
Google kept its browser, told to share some data and drop a few exclusive deals. Naturally,
12:03
Google is appealing. The monopoly it held was deemed illegal, yet practically stayed in place.
12:08
But Google’s plan has a fatal flaw It needs to keep eating human knowledge
12:12
faster than it kills the source. If those sources weaken, there’s less to draw from.
12:17
So you end up with a built-in paradox. Google is a snake eating its own tail.
12:22
Chapter 8: The Dead Internet Spiral When websites lose traffic, they lose revenue.
12:27
When revenue dries up, they scale back or shut down entirely. The systems built on that don’t
12:33
just slow down, they start reaching for whatever is left. That means Google’s AI needs to train on
12:38
content produced by other systems like itself. It’s the slow rot that sets in when a system
12:43
learns from copies of copies. Each new version drifts further from the truth. The errors pile up,
12:49
the ideas narrow, and human thought flattens into pale comparison of what came before.
12:55
An answer engine that eats its own food supply runs out of things to say.
12:59
For about 30 years, anyone with something to say could publish it to the world. If you were right,
13:04
people could find you. A curious browser could learn from an expert on the other
13:08
side of the planet. A small shop could be found for being good,
13:11
not for being big. Now the web fills with pages written by AI, built to game the system. Real
13:17
voices get harder to find each year and you start to question if a person wrote what you’re reading.
13:23
Doubt and cynicism becomes the default. That’s not how human knowledge is supposed
13:27
to grow and develop. Now, curiosity is run by gatekeepers and paywalls.
13:31
The shared library is being locked. This is how you kill a website without ever
13:36
attacking it. You just stop sending people to it.. But the pushback is already starting. Publishers
13:41
are organizing to charge the machines directly. Really Simple Licensing borrows a familiar
13:46
playbook from the music industry. Radio had to start paying for songs, and now the idea is to
13:51
apply the same logic to AI systems consuming web content. If you can’t survive on clicks anymore,
13:57
you sell access to the work itself. News sites, authors and small publishers are all
14:01
testing versions of that idea. Still, it may not be enough.
14:05
Because the deeper damage isn’t just financial. It’s not even just about which websites survive
14:10
and which don’t. It’s the weakening of something more basic: the link between
14:15
knowing something and sharing it openly. Google may well win its race.
14:19
But the result could be a world with less worth knowing.
14:22
This isn’t the only way Google is destroying the web. The rise of AI slop is taking over
14:27
your search page. Find out more in ‘You NEED to STOP Using Google Right Now’. Or watch this.
