The Google “AI Apocalypse” is Real: Search is Broken and Publishers Are Being Killed

Google’s promise was simple: AI Overviews (formerly SGE) would make search faster, smarter, and more helpful.

The reality is a disaster.

Google is now facing a massive, two-front controversy: they are simultaneously killing website traffic for publishers while providing users with confidently wrong and often absurd answers. This isn’t innovation; it’s a “managed decline” of the open internet, where Google effectively takes the hard work of creators and keeps the profits for itself.

From advising users to put glue on pizza to causing a near-80% traffic collapse for certain keywords, Google’s AI-first search is a high-stakes failure. Let’s break down why this feature is an existential threat to the web we know 👇

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🔪 The Traffic Apocalypse: Publishers Are Bleeding Out

For online publishers and creators, clicks are oxygen. Google’s AI Overviews are effectively shutting off that supply.

📉 The Click-Through Rate Collapse

AI Overviews appear at the very top of search results, summarizing the answer from source material. The problem? Users stop clicking.

• The Data: Users are 50% less likely to click on links in search results with an AI Overview attached.
• The Impact: One analysis found that a site previously ranked first could lose about 79% of its traffic for that specific query if the result was delivered below an AI Overview.

Publishers like the MailOnline reported clickthrough rates dropping by over 56% on desktop sites featuring AI summaries. News media executives have rightly called this an “existential threat” to their business model.

🔒 The Walled Garden Strategy

Google insists it sends “billions of clicks” to websites, yet it simultaneously refuses to share the data publishers need to track the impact of the AI summaries.

Critics correctly argue that Google is trying to keep users “within its own walled garden, taking and monetizing valuable content… created by the hard work of others”. This strategy directly threatens the diversity and richness of independent niche publishers who rely on organic traffic.

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🤡 The Accuracy Crisis: Confidently Wrong

While the theft of traffic is a business problem, the epidemic of AI hallucinations is a public safety problem. Google’s AI Overviews have become infamous for generating wrong, misleading, and sometimes dangerous advice.

🗑️ The Viral Failures

The internet has been flooded with examples of the AI feature failing basic logic and generating absurd advice:

• Culinary Calamity: Suggesting users apply glue to pizza to keep cheese from sticking.
• Historical Errors: Incorrectly labeling former U.S. President Barack Obama as Muslim.
• Temporal Blindness: Missing recent news, such as using an outdated press release to estimate a NASA launch date.

Even Google’s own AI, when asked about its accuracy, has wildly overestimated its rate of hallucination—a staggering display of ironic failure.

⛔ The Lack of Accountability

Google says the “vast majority of AI Overviews are highly factual”. But their actions contradict their words: they were forced to disable the AI Overviews for specific problematic searches due to the intense backlash.

The fact is, generative AI systems are designed to recognize patterns, not truth. Relying on them to replace the hard-won expertise of professional publishers—especially in YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics—is a catastrophic misstep.

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💬 Final Thoughts — The Internet is Being Surfed

The Google AI Overview controversy is more than a software bug; it’s a signal that the “managed decline” of the open internet is accelerating. The core business model of content creation—writing for search engines to earn clicks—is being systematically dismantled.

By pushing the link further down the page and summarizing content for users, Google is turning the vibrant, diverse web into a homogenized, passive space. The question for all of us is: when Google uses its monopoly power to extract the content without paying for the traffic, how long can quality information survive?

This is an unsustainable situation that requires urgent action.