For more than two decades, if we felt a pain in the chest or wanted to know the direction of a restaurant, the weather forecast for the weekend or the birth date of Lionel Messi, we opened Google, we wrote the question and ready. In seconds, the famous blue links appeared with precise information. Googlear became the verb of our era: the digital reflection act to solve any questions, from the most trivial to the most existential.
But that era is coming to an end.
As we met it, the open web is mutating – and in many ways, disappearing – in front of our eyes. The main reason has a name and surname: artificial intelligence. This new technological paradigm is silently devouring the old internet based on sites, links and clicks. And the main responsible for this change is none other than Google himself.
The most powerful search engine on the planet is pushing millions of users towards a new way of interacting with the information: a website without clicks. The concept, disturbing for many sectors, describes a scenario where people no longer need to leave the platform to find what they are looking for. Tools such as AI Overviews or AI Mode, recently launched, offer direct, summarized and automatic responses, without the need to show the traditional results in the form of links. The interface still seems familiar, but its logic changed completely: it is no longer about leading the user to the other side, but about retaining it.
The paradigm shift also represents the rupture of a tacit pact that governed for two decades between Google and content creators. For years, the logic was simple but effective: if the media, bloggers or specialized sites published original, useful and relevant content, Google was responsible for rewarding them with traffic. This constant flow of visits fed a digital ecosystem based on click logic: users came from the search engine, the sites gained visibility, monetized with advertising, and some even managed to convert readers into subscribers.
That balance is now in crisis.
The new direct response system, driven by artificial intelligence, in many cases eliminates the need to click. And without click there is no traffic. Without traffic, there are no advertising income. And without income, the media – especially independent or specialized – are unprotected in an ecosystem that was already beaten.
The data confirms it. According to a recent study published by The Wall Street Journal, 75 % of Google searches no longer end up in a click. That is, three out of four users obtain the answer directly on the platform without the need to visit any external site. This represents a direct blow to the heart of the business model of the open web.
The impact on the media is concrete: Traffic from Google towards informative portals fell between 30 and 50 % in the last three years. A decline that puts in check not only the metrics, but the very sustainability of hundreds of writings around the world.
Historical portals such as Huffpost, The Washington Post or Business Insider already suffer the consequences of this transformation. The case of Business Insider is paradigmatic: he had to fire 21% of his template in the middle of an abrupt fall of traffic. According to Similar data, the organic visit to many of these media collapsed more than 50 % since 2022. Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, was blunt about it: “Google is ceasing to be a search engine to become an engine of answers,” he said, referring to this new model where the platform retains users with summaries generated by ia instead of redirect original
But the threat is not just traffic. It is also content. The articles, reports, reviews and analysis produced by the media are used to train the large language models – such as Chatgpt, Claude or Gemini – without any compensation. Many media do not even know that they are feeding their own texts to the systems that are taken today. While some, like The New York Times, chose to bring the case to justice, others, such as News Corp, decided to negotiate agreements with AI platforms to license their contents. Each chooses their strategy, but the damage is already done.
The click crisis, however, goes beyond journalism. All the architecture of the open web, from Wikipedia to the review sites such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, suffers the impact. Wikipedia, for example, represents 63 % of global encyclopedic knowledge traffic. But with the answers generated by AI, less and fewer people enter the site. The same goes for fashion portals, home decoration, kitchen or tourism: categories that previously benefited from traffic derived from specific searches – how to do a risotto or what places to see in Lisbon in three days – and that today are reduced their exposure to the minimum.
Last May, visits from search engines to United States tourist sites fell 20 % compared to the same month of the previous year. The impact becomes more tangible when individual cases are observed: Dave Bouskill and Debra Corbeil, founders of the Travel Blog The Planet D, were forced to leave their place after losing 90 % of their traffic after the launch of AI Overviews, the new Google generative search function. “Seeing our replicated travel tips without receiving a single click was painful. We felt betrayed,” they said in an interview with Bloomberg.
The blow is not limited to editorial content. Even electronic commerce begins to feel the shake: visits from search engines to online stores fell 9 % in the same period. In an environment where each click can be translated into a conversion, that decline represents millions in losses for small and medium enterprises that depend on organic traffic to support their sales.
From Google they deny having negatively affected the sites. The company argues that user behavior changed with the arrival of tools such as Chatgpt and other language models, and that the new approach responds to that demand. According to their vision, people no longer want a list of links but clear, fast responses and, if you wish, options to deepen. In other words: it is not that Google has changed alone; It is the world that is changing.
And, indeed, the change of time is evident. The web is leaving behind the exploration and navigation model to embrace a synthesis and efficiency. But that efficiency, held by millions of users, is putting in check the economic balance of the creators that support that same website.
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Less humans, more automation
For now, searches remain an immense source of income for Google. Only last year, Alphabet – the parent company – raised more than 225,000 million dollars for advertising, of which 58,000 million came from YouTube. But although the figures still amazed, the business model based on clicks to links is being put to the test. What happens when the answer comes complete, without the user having to leave the search engine? Where will the money of the advertisers go?
Today, platforms such as chatgpt, perplexity or Claude still do not offer payments payments to appear in their answers. There is no “first place” or visible banners. The visibility logic changed, and advertisers begin to wonder how to play on this new board.
Goal, meanwhile, appears better installed to face this new future. Owner of closed networks such as Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, does not depend on the traffic generated by Google. On the contrary: combines traditional ads with new hypersegmented formats, within an ecosystem that controls from end to end. And it goes for more. Last month, in an interview with Ben Thompson in the Podcast Stratechery, Mark Zuckerberg was clear: “The end of advertising agencies is close.” According to your vision, any company or person may design campaigns without depending on creatives, media experts or strategic planning.
He will do it with the help of artificial intelligence, which will generate the notices and automatically distribute them to the most relevant public.
That future has already begun. According to company spokesmen, 98 % of advertisers who use the Advantage+ target tool are obtaining better results than with traditional campaigns. Less humans, more automation.
Companies whose traffic depends strongly on Google are, today, the most exposed. Airbnb, for example, is still very vulnerable to losing visibility in searches. And TripAdvisor received 85 % of his visits through the search engine. What happens if that source dries?
Beyond the numbers, which does not admit discussion is that we are attending at the end of an era. The era of click, of the link, of the obsession with the SEO. We are moving from the information age to the era of imagination. Today maybe it is worth knowing a good prompt than remembering a historical date. The information became a commodity: it is everywhere, instantly, within reach of anyone.
And the markets intuit it. Alphabet’s stock market action fell 7 % so far this year. Not because of its current results, but because of the vertigo of the change that has already begun. The search engine that organized the world now tries to reinvent it. But nobody still knows who will be the winner in the era No clicks.
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