Google Declaring War on the Web

Citizen_Lame

Welcome to the third-party internet. Unless every micro-decision you make while browsing can be stripped down, packaged into neat data points, and sold, you're not welcome here.

nate

I've got a half thought about concept that maybe we need a concept like AMP back. I hated AMP. I'm glad it's dead. But you could use it to define things that you were at least advised that it would be shown in the google ui and carousel. I feel like we need a guarantee from the LLMs that if we provide some kind of meta data in our source material you'll honor stuff from it. Like show our advertisers so we get some revenue still from you showing our content on your LLM site. Totally vibed version of this: ``` { "version": " https://agent-source.org/v1 ", "canonical_url": " https://ninjasandrobots.com/the-cone ", "title": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "source_name": "Ninjas and Robots", "author": "Nathan Kontny", "summary": "An essay about embarrassment, public action, and why obvious fixes go undone.", "preferred_citation": "Ninjas and Robots", "source_card": { "headline": "The Real Reason Nobody Moved the Cone", "description": "People avoid obvious public actions not because they are lazy, but because being seen trying is embarrassing.", "image": " https://ninjasandrobots.com/images/cone-card.jpg ", "cta": "Read the full essay" }, "allowed_excerpt": { "max_chars": 500, "preferred_excerpt": "People often avoid obvious public action because embarrassment feels more immediate than danger." }, "commercial_terms": { "ads_allowed": true, "sponsor_card_url": " https://ninjasandrobots.com/.well-known/sponsor-card.json ", "licensing_contact": "hello@ninjasandrobots.com" } } ``` But something to get our original source honored better in the LLM. Maybe if one of the LLMs do this, we'd give it more loyalty? Maybe the government needs to compel this kind of behavior? No idea. It does suck though our content is just turned into AI's own tokens and we're left with a tiny "source" link if we're lucky.

gjsman-1000

This war was already declared a decade ago. By many interests. And victory followed. I think though a big part of this was YouTube replaced blogs. It's a generational thing.

aucisson_masque

If it's so bad, people won't use it. If it's good, why be against it ? You don't write post to reach the biggest amount of people, you do because you're passionate and ultimately you get people following you. If average Joe doesn't go on your website, what's the big deal ? I think this feature will be very useful to fight back on the optimized SEO hell that we currently have.

superkuh

It is not just about replacing search results with text blurbs generated on Alphabet premise either. They're making it so that unless you have an Android certified (Or Apple) smartphone you will not be a human being, you will be assumed to be a bot and blocked by their captchas.

crazygringo

The AI answers provide tons of source links. At the end of the day, is it really all that different to provide a list of links, versus an answer or overview of a few paragraphs with links to lots of different higher-quality sources? I follow those source links all the time . Not just to "check sources" but because they provide a ton more detail. And the links are usually much better than what I'll get with regular keyword search results. > It’s about monopolizing access to information. Not as long as there are competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. In fact, LLM's have provided Google with stronger competition than it's ever had before. ChatGPT and Claude are doing what Bing was never able to.

raincole

I don't know if it's Google AB-testing something, but the summaries below usual search result entries (the non-AI ones) are unbelievably bad today. Sometimes the link is a Reddit or SO post, but the summary is from a reply/answer with no vote contradicting the highest-voted ones. It's conspiracy, but it feels like Google is actively making the usual search worse so everyone will use AI overview more.

LinuxAmbulance

We abrogated getting traffic to our websites to Google long ago. Mostly because Google was so good at it that the alternatives became significantly less useful. Now that Google is focusing on becoming 'self contained', so to speak, we should find a better way to drive traffic to websites. Ideally one that's not under the control of a single corporation. Anyone miss StumbleUpon?

dude250711

Well, they are kind of desperate after missing both cloud and AI. I would blame trash like Discord more though. Alternative search engines are available, but the crappy little web chat hides info inside.

hartator

While they seem against being scraped themselves: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-motion-to-dismiss-...

newAccount2025

I would feel more sad about this if the web wasn’t so rotten to begin with. On average, any random site is just trying to throw ads at you and harass you to subscribe and such.

gmuslera

It is not a war on the web, but on how it was traditionally used (and abused). And that "traditional" way was shaped by google too. As you want a cookie, i put you in a table, napking, serve you a bag of cookies and hope that you eat/find the cookie you want, while hearing my music, watching my ads, pushing you more foods that I sell and other services. And sometimes, that is the experience you are searching for. But also, many just want a cookie. That is what a conversational and maybe agentic interface can give you. Have someone a blueberry cookie? Then it gives it to you, and also give pointers to restaurants that give a more complete experience sometimes (while others may try to scam you). It is a shortcut, but also doesn't hide you the traditional way to access that. They are not saints, but neither are all the ones in the other side. But the new way to access the relevant information you want, in a way that you can use it, have its own value.

coro_1

> De-googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Find other search engines, don’t use the Chrome browser. Or wake up in a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant. Everything is probably re-traceable fairly easily because Google Analytics is on nearly every web page. But I understand maintaining your own source of archives, videos, documents, etc. Sounds like a good vibe coding project actually.. to try and keep it all organized offline.

mudil

Google declared war on blogs and other content long time ago, when it used our websites to harvest data to target readers with ads accross the entire internet. We used to have (for twenty years!) medical technology website for MDs. How can we compete with short unrelated YouTube videos or other spam content that serve Google ads targeting doctors? How do you think the entire creative blogosphere of the early 2000s collapsed into nothingness?

DeusExMachina

I don't understand the endgame here. Websites let Google crawl their content in exchange of traffic. If Google cuts that out completely, what incentive do websites have to not block the Google crawlers? I understand that Google is feeling an existential threat from other AI products that provide answers directly. But they must also understand their symbiotic relationship with the web.

jollymonATX

As a website owner I have seen major upticks in viewership myself but really it hits hard when you see an Ai summary that is wrong and your sites there. The whole Ai for everything push unfortunatly will downskill the world I fear and nothing can be done about it.

analogpixel

I feel like AI has gotten to the point where the message is: If you want to make something (art/code/music/writing) you can do it for your own enjoyment, but you aren't allowed to make money from it anymore; only the large corporations can make money from content. If you do release something creative, it'll just be fed back into the machine to be copied over and over.

LocalH

Good thing they took "Do no evil" out of their manifesto years ago

Barbing

I thought this was going to be about having to use your corporate approved phone to scan reCATCHA QR codes. Was just able to opt out of my first one but obviously won’t be able to forever.

jppope

I'm confused how the strategy works in the long run. If fewer people are incentivized to build websites on novel topics, there will be less content in general and less training data... plus AI overview results see less ad conversions and therefor less ad revenue. Whats the long game? I get that the paradigm is changing but this seems like its not going to help them maintain their dominance.