Close-up of a person’ using Google AI Mode. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
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Google just telegraphed that it’s on the cusp of implementing one of the biggest changes to internet search in years, and it’s one that should probably be setting off alarm bells across the publishing industry.
Robby Stein, Google Search VP of Product, announced on X on Friday that users can now open Google’s new AI Mode by going directly to google.com/ai. Minutes later, Logan Kilpatrick — the lead product manager for DeepMind, Gemini, and all of Google’s AI products — took things one step further: Responding to a user who commented that AI Mode “must be the default” for Google Search, Kilpatrick responded that the change would indeed roll out “soon.”
His casual confirmation, needless to say, is about to make life much more difficult than it already is for anyone in the business of publishing digital content — particularly news outlets that depend on search traffic to sustain their operations.
Google’s AI Overviews, which contain the content that Google has synthesized from web pages it’s crawled, has already had a profound impact on the traffic that Google sends to outside sites. Because who needs to click through to an actual website, when Google just rips out an answer from that web page and loads it at the top of a search results page?
AI Mode, meanwhile, will make that problem even worse.
Making AI Mode the Google Search default
In this mode, instead of typing in a normal search query, the user can engage in a back-and-forth with what’s essentially a Google chatbot that crawls the web, spits out answers, and pushes publisher links to the side of the page. Where basically no one will interact with them.
The irony there is hard to miss. The X user who drew out Kilpatrick’s ‘soon’ comment was basically saying it’s too much effort to click one extra button to reach AI Mode. But that’s the very problem publishers face — readers rarely click past Google’s AI answers to get to the original articles.
AI Mode will “soon” be the default Google Search option.
X
All of this, of course, threatens to accelerate what many in media circles describe as “Google Zero,” the point at which the search giant (a search giant, by the way, that the US government asserts is a monopolist) stops sending any traffic whatsoever to this or that outside site. Indeed, the damage is already being done.
According to data from Similarweb, for example, Business Insider’s search traffic fell 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, and HuffPost’s by more than 50%.
And a recent study done by Digital Content Next, whose members include the New York Times, Condé Nast, and Vox, found referral traffic drops of as much as 25% during eight weeks between May and June of this year. Other reports confirm the same trend: More and more searches are satisfied before a user ever leaves Google.
Google’s whole AI enterprise is sort of like the search giant disseminating the CliffsNotes version of the internet, while the writers and brands that did the actual work of giving Google something to summarize in the first place are relegated to footnotes. Yes, there are paths forward like subscriptions and licensing deals, among other things. But the scale of the challenge shouldn’t be underestimated.
If — sorry, when AI Mode becomes the default way that billions of people start using Google, the traditional publishing business model won’t just be under strain. It will be under siege, to put it mildly.