If you’re in my line of work, you know the phrase “search engine optimization” intimately. It haunts your dreams. It occupies space in every boring-ass PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever had to sit through. It might even be standing outside your bedroom window right now, blinking S-E-O in blinding, neon pink letters. SEO has quietly lorded over every internet writer’s work for decades now, forcing professionals like me to tailor our headlines, not to mention our very ideas, to its mysterious whims.
If you want people to read your work, and I do, you must pay tribute to the SEO gods if you want that writing to be easily discovered. And you must kneel before one SEO god in particular: Google. Google has ruled the search engine market for the entirety of this century, which is why every media outlet I’ve ever worked at, this one included, has dedicated nearly endless amounts of both personnel and tech to make sure that when you, the reader, search for articles on why Meta’s new sunglasses make you look like a complete tool, by God that’s exactly what you get.
FILE: A man walks past Google signage.
AFP via Getty Images
But, while slaving away at perfecting their search engine optimization infrastructure, none of those outlets ever seriously asked themselves the question, what if there comes a day when the search engine optimizes for itself, and only itself?
Article continues below this ad
That day has arrived. You and I know that the quality of Google’s search results has been lacking for years now. But last week, the company announced plans to essentially kill off its search results entirely, addressing all of your queries with its Gemini AI agent instead. Look at this horrible s—t. Look at it!
Someone get me a cup of lye to soak my eyeballs in.
Google was already attempting to steer users toward stolen content by auto-populating the top of every search with an artificial intelligence overview, followed by sponsored links and sometimes a bunch of other unwanted crap. If you want purely web-based search results from Google, you now have to hunt around for the “Web” filter in one of Google’s submenus. Or you have to manually input code into your search so that the AI demon isn’t the first thing you see. And that’s if you actually care about what you’re searching for. Many people don’t; they’ll get a top-line answer from AI and deem it not worth the trouble to click or scroll any further.
Article continues below this ad
This is why, when Google’s algorithm de-prioritized external links, it killed off traffic to all publishing sites, this one included, by about a quarter or more virtually overnight. Sites like SFGATE need traffic to survive, and writers like me need those sites to stay alive if we hope to remain gainfully employed by them. Now Google, which is set as the default search engine in nearly every piece of tech you consume, is poised to cut off their oxygen supply altogether. So if you’ve recently asked yourself, “How can they kill journalism even deader?” — this is how.
And this is why Google needs to be seized by the government and broken into a trillion little pieces.
FILE: Google Co-founder and President of Products Larry Page, left, and Co-founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin appear at Google’s campus headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images
This isn’t just a me problem. You don’t have to be a writer to have your livelihood be dependent upon Google search results. Small-business owners need Google to reach potential new customers. Students, many of them working on school-issued Chromebooks made by Google, need it to research term papers and study for final exams. In its earliest form, Google dot-com was the perfect utility for all of these people and millions more. Hop in the Wayback Machine with me back to the halcyon days of 1998, when the search engine was a grad student project and not a global behemoth, now branded as Alphabet, with a market cap in the trillions of dollars. You entered your search into a little text box, and HEY PRESTO! You were given an initial list of 10 useful links, delivered with zero clutter. Early Google didn’t even have ads; it was so clean and pure.
Article continues below this ad
I cannot begin to tell you what a revelation this was to those of us surfing the neonatal internet, when our search options were limited to the motley crew of Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Ask Jeeves. Jeeves knew nothing. Google Search knew what you wanted, and it gave it to you quickly, without any fuss. It was the best product in its category by far, to the point of becoming a necessary digital utility for nearly everyone on Earth. Google Search made your life, and mine, better.
Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind, speaks at the 2026 Google I/O technology developer conference in Mountain View, Calif., on May 19, 2026.
Karl Mondon/AFP/Getty Images
By contrast, Google’s 2026 pivot to being a nearly AI-exclusive product will still undoubtedly make your life worse. Instead of giving you precisely what you want, a Google search in 2026 is more likely to give you only what you don’t want. Want to know the definition of a word? Well, you’re gonna have to consult a physical dictionary if you hope to get a correct one. Need to know more about the Civil War? Well tough titty for you, because Gemini will hide any link to any historian’s deeply researched account and offer you a slapdash CliffsNotes version of the war instead. Google dot-com is less of a utility now than it is a roach motel: Enter something into its prompt, and suddenly you find yourself trapped inside a dungeon with no way out.
Stay informed, and entertained.
By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy.
Social media sites like Facebook and X have long had a nasty habit of throttling links to keep you on their respective sites rather than click away from them. Google, which ditched its founding “Don’t be evil” ethos ages ago, is now doing likewise. Its latest search prototype will wall you off from other people’s writing, their products, their very ideas. The underlying hope, one imagines, is that you’ll become more reliant on machines instead of real people for your informational needs. Pretty much every other AI slop factory has a similar operating mindset, which makes all of them, collectively, an active threat to human civilization. Given Google Search’s ubiquity, its inescapability, it now stands as perhaps the greatest threat of the lot. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really tired of all these existential threats. I was just trying to find a decent coq au vin recipe.
Article continues below this ad
FILE: Daniel Linver of San Francisco, second from left, and James Rucker, the executive director of Color of Change, which is part of a coalition called Save the Internet, carry boxes of petitions to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., on Aug. 13, 2010.
S.F Chronicle/Getty Images
This is a crisis born not only out of corporate greed but a collective naivete on the user side of things. I never expected Google Search to cease searching, and neither did my overlords at Hearst. I naively assumed that Google, for all of its amorality, still found tremendous financial value in the sharing of information, of using the internet’s unfathomable power to connect people with one another, and with one another’s work in turn. I didn’t expect it to become so rapacious, not to mention cynical, and that it would gleefully lead the tech sector’s charge to render human ideas, human beings, a depreciated asset. In that context, I can only see Google as an entity that hates me. And you, too. Again, I am exhausted.
There is some faint hope. Internet users, myself included, are switching to purer search tools like DuckDuckGo as their default search options. And there are initial signs that the AI scam — and it is very much a scam — is losing traction with some of its implementers. So maybe you and I can look forward to a future where humane products experience a market renaissance and where the information economy isn’t ruled by a bunch of algorithms that don’t even know how to spell the word “cat.” That would be a nice world to live in. I just wish it wasn’t so hard to search for a way to get there.