![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/1757312048_173_960x0.jpg\")
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Close-up of a person’ using Google AI Mode. (Photo by Smith Collection\/Gado\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Gado via Getty Images <\/p>\n
Google just telegraphed that it\u2019s on the cusp of implementing one of the biggest changes to internet search in years, and it\u2019s one that should probably be setting off alarm bells across the publishing industry.<\/p>\n
Robby Stein, Google Search VP of Product, announced on X<\/a> on Friday that users can now open Google\u2019s new AI Mode by going directly to google.com\/ai<\/a>. Minutes later, Logan Kilpatrick \u2014 the lead product manager for DeepMind, Gemini, and all of Google\u2019s AI products \u2014 took things one step further: Responding to a user who commented that AI Mode \u201cmust be the default\u201d for Google Search, Kilpatrick responded that the change would indeed roll out \u201csoon.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 particularly news outlets that depend on search traffic to sustain their operations.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s AI Overviews, which contain the content that Google has synthesized from web pages it\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n AI Mode, meanwhile, will make that problem even worse.<\/p>\n Making AI Mode the Google Search default<\/p>\n In this mode, instead of typing in a normal search query<\/a>, the user can engage in a back-and-forth with what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The irony there is hard to miss. The X user who drew out Kilpatrick\u2019s \u2018soon\u2019 comment was basically saying it\u2019s too much effort to click one extra button to reach AI Mode. But that\u2019s the very problem publishers face \u2014 readers rarely click past Google\u2019s AI answers to get to the original articles.<\/p>\n AI Mode will “soon” be the default Google Search option.<\/p>\n X <\/p>\n All of this, of course, threatens to accelerate what many in media circles describe as \u201cGoogle Zero,\u201d the point at which the search giant (a search giant, by the way, that the US government asserts is a monopolist<\/a>) stops sending any traffic whatsoever to this or that outside site. Indeed, the damage is already being done.<\/p>\n According to data from Similarweb, for example, Business Insider’s<\/a> search traffic fell 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, and HuffPost’s by more than 50%.<\/p>\n