ChatGPT had been up and running for less than a month and Google was already talking about a “code red”. The technology that many assumed would end Google’s core business—replacing the search engine with any chatbot—is doing just the opposite. Since Google introduced Gemini into its search engine with AI Mode, it has replaced link lists with conversational responses. AND it’s working for thembecause people spend more time than ever within Google itself.
The problem is for everyone else.
We love AI Mode. According to three studies compiled by The New York Timesusers spend between one and nine minutes more in AI Mode than in a traditional search. They also write queries up to three times longer than the questions in which we used usual keywords, according to data that Google itself presented at its May event.
From snippets to this. A Growth Memo October Studya company specialized in search and marketing, detected that in 75% of sessions users do not even leave AI Mode: they are very comfortable there and forget about the rest of the website. It’s something the company has been doing for years.and they certainly tried before AI arrived to conquer almost everything: snippets and other elements designed by Google they have always had the goal to be sufficient for we wouldn’t have to click in any link.
Google Zero. Nilay Patel, director of The Verge, has long been warning of a phenomenon he calls “Google Zero”, when traffic from Google would fall to practically zero for the media. According to him “for publishers, Google Zero has already arrived.” With AI Mode people could see that that initial slow trickle became a real turning point.
On Google they say it’s not that big a deal. Google Vice President Liz Reid assured on an official Google blog last year that the company continues to send a “relatively stable” number of clicks to the media, and that reports of traffic drops used “flawed methodologies.”
The clear example: Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation has registered an 8% decrease in human visitors in the last year. What has grown, of course, are bots that crawl your content to train AI models. Its director of product and technology, Selena Deckelmann, highlighted that “my job is to make sure that people don’t forget about us because the Google interface has changed.”
Human trafficking plummets in media. According to Cloudflaremore than half of all current web traffic is no longer human, and between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites in sectors such as finance, media or retail e-commerce sites has fallen by 40%. Before, if we wanted to know the performance of a footballer in the World Cup, we would ask on Google and look through links. Today it is enough to ask the AI mode to obtain that information and then continue talking with the Google chatbot in that mode if we need it.
background voltage. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Webalready warned in 2024 that AI had accelerated a trend that had been underway for years: that of locking users in closed ecosystems designed to maximize profit, instead of directing us to an open and borderless web like the one he imagined in 1989.
Bad future for media companies. In May Vox Media, owner of media outlets such as The Verge, began selling some of its websites. Jim Bankoff, its CEO, explained that “decimating search traffic” as Google was doing had influenced his decision to look for other ways to reach audiences. From there went on to sell him half of Vox Media to James Murdoch.
In Xataka | I asked the AI any nonsense and now I’m writing a news story about it
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