Artificial intelligence summaries from the likes of Google Gemini are very enticing. Who needs to scour an article for a fact or information when Google can just pull it out and present it to you?
But fewer visits to news publishers’ websites mean less advertising revenue for those companies. That threatens their business and the journalism they create.
"The open web is on its way out. With AI, Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers,” Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, said in a New York Times article.
Google announced its latest search changes on May 19 at its Google I/O conference. It called the changes its “biggest upgrade in over 25 years.”
“Google’s AI search tools may genuinely improve usability, but they also fundamentally reshape the web ecosystem Google originally helped build,” Techradar contributing writer Eric Hal Schwartz said in a news post. “Publishers, creators, and websites increasingly worry that conversational AI answers reduce incentives for users to click through to original sources.”
TechCrunch writer Sarah Perez summed it up by writing, “The era of the ‘ten blue links’ is officially over.”
She added, “The links, to clarify, have not entirely disappeared; they are just no longer the priority for many types of searches.”
The big news publishers have been able to extract licensing fees from Google and other AI firms for scraping their content, but the little guys are largely on the outs.
Related articles:
Journalism job cuts in 2026 tracked (Press Gazette)
New York Times chief: How and why publishers should fight AI ‘tsunami’ (Press Gazette; June 2, 2026)
New York Times Publisher Warns That AI Companies Are Making Choices That ‘Violate Settled Law’ and Could Cause a ‘Great Deal of Unnecessary Harm’ (Variety; June 1, 2026)
News Corp CEO Robert Thomson warns AI companies scraping without paying: ‘We’re coming for you’ (Press Gazette; March 4, 2026)
News Corp, Meta in AI Content Licensing Deal Worth Up to $50 Million a Year (Wall Street Journal; March 3, 2026)