The Death Knell of Digital Search

Lately, I’ve been having trouble finding stuff in my Gmail inbox. The Search function has become overzealous, jumping to summarize my conversations using artificial intelligence and skipping the actual addresses I’m attempting to search. It’s not just e-mail accounts, though; search is in crisis everywhere. Google Maps guesses where I want to go at a given time of day instead of simply listing places I’ve just searched for. When I try to use Google Search, the A.I.-overview function sometimes occupies my entire browser window, generating its own, not always correct, answers rather than directing me to relevant websites. Full-on A.I. mode skips the old blue links entirely.

Search has gotten so annoying, in fact, that it has become a problem for Google’s very business model. Companies pay Google to splash ads into search results that are relevant to their businesses—advertising stoves, say, to someone searching for kitchen-renovation tips. More than half of Google’s revenue comes from those ads. But, if users aren’t clicking through to external sites, because they’re relying on A.I. to answer their queries, then the ads that Google hosts are suddenly much less valuable. In a recent earnings call, Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, admitted that the company has been seeing “lower monetization” on A.I. searches. After the call, the stock of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fell by nearly a quarter, down five hundred billion dollars, the largest single-day drop in its history. Even Google may not be too big to fail, as pessimism mounts about the possibility of Search ever again working the way it used to.

Just as Google has faltered in Search, use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has surged. OpenAI’s consumer-product lead, Adam Fry, recently told the tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz that ChatGPT is siphoning users away from the older company: over the past year and a half, it has grown to handle one-fifth the volume of “search-like queries” that Google does. This acceleration only makes sense: a growing number of people now rely on A.I. chatbots as their primary windows to the internet, and they’re less likely to click out of those apps to ask the kinds of simple questions that they might once have turned to Google to answer. It doesn’t help that bots have lately grown much better at browsing the internet in real time, using virtual browsers and plug-ins, rather than simply generating answers from preëxisting data. Google has its own suite of A.I. products, Gemini, but they’ve lagged in popularity behind Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT. The investment firm Menlo Ventures found that Gemini accounts for only nine per cent of A.I. spending for businesses in 2026, down from twenty-one per cent last year.

Can the internet as we know it survive without a reliable flood of search traffic? Chatbots treat websites as databases of information to draw from, but since they divert traffic from those sites they don’t provide much impetus for creators to keep posting new content. The end state we’re heading toward seems to be an internet both generated and traversed by bots—in which case, it will no longer matter how annoying it is for a mere human being to find information. Some websites are already moving defensively to keep out the trawling bots attempting to digest their content. Reddit, one of the internet’s major remaining repositories of human-generated knowledge and opinions, is moving toward “a primarily logged-in experience,” as its C.E.O., Steve Huffman, recently announced. In a third-quarter letter to shareholders, Huffman noted that Reddit’s search traffic “dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week” during October. The letter explained, “Web search is evolving from a gateway to the web to becoming an AI-powered destination itself.” In a recent earnings call, Huffman said that “people still want Reddit” but that “Google is not sending them to Reddit the way they used to.” Requiring users to log in is the equivalent of pulling up the drawbridge to keep away the A.I. models roaming outside. But it also means that the casual human searcher will be less likely to see the full conversations happening on Reddit.

In 2019, before the A.I. boom, the entrepreneur Yancey Strickler presciently outlined a “dark-forest theory of the internet.” As the web experience got worse, Strickler argued—because of “the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors”—users would retreat to more private, hidden online spaces, or “dark forests,” in search of human interaction. We once used search to find those dark forests and find the humans on the internet who were doing whatever we were interested in. Now those old tricks of Boolean operators and half-remembered keywords don’t work, because we’re meant to trust a robot to do the navigating for us instead. I often feel that the internet isn’t built for us human users anymore.

One prominent tech-commentator account on X has described companies as locked in “a knife fight for the remaining and dwindling volume of human traffic on the internet.” Many seem to have bought into the narrative that the old-school open internet is done for, so they’re scrambling to lock users into their own, A.I.-automated walled gardens. (Not to be left behind, Reddit is introducing an algorithmic For You feed and A.I.-generated short-form videos based on its content.) Google recently inspired a public backlash when it announced that it would make A.I. functions optional, rather than permanently accessible, on its software suite for schools and students, but with a catch: if schools turned off the Gemini A.I. functions, they would lose access to Google Search, too. This policy amounts to a threat: use generative A.I. or use nothing. The largest tech companies are investing so much capital in A.I. infrastructure—chips, data centers, intensively trained models—that they must make the bet pay off, one way or another.

The upshot is that, more often than not, I find myself using A.I. to fight back against aggressive A.I. Instead of using the Gmail app on my phone, I’ve been texting my questions about my own inbox to an A.I. agent called Instinct, which I recently granted access to my account. (It’s a security risk, to be sure, but one I was willing to take to see if the product is any good for techno-normies.) In a matter of seconds, Instinct can dig up an event invitation or a note from someone whose name I can’t quite remember. Instead of Googling potential interview subjects, I have Claude scrape for their contact information. But I would really prefer if Search just worked the way it did in the first place. ♦

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