At its annual conference, Google introduced what it described as the biggest update to its search box in more than 25 years, turning search into an AI-driven experience that answers questions, builds visualizations and runs background agents that track information for the user. The familiar list of links is still there, but it now sits within a broader interface that often handles the navigation itself.
Many see this as a major step toward what has been known as Google Zero, a search model where Google stops functioning as a gateway and becomes the only platform users visit when browsing the web. Such reshaping of how people interact with the web raises certain concerns about the future of web access for businesses and private users.
4 Ways to Protect the Open Web
- Go to the source.
- Create fair rules for scalable data access.
- Adapt to AI search.
- Give credit where it’s due.
Google Zero Is No Longer Hypothetical
For most of its history, Google’s role has been to send people somewhere else. A business or publisher would create something useful, get ranked and receive traffic in return, which helped fund making that content. Google Zero anticipates a future where Google breaks that loop by providing direct answers to queries, additional context and an opportunity to dig deeper by asking AI more questions directly on the search results page. Thus, it sends minimal referral traffic to external websites, reducing the number of users who ever leave Google’s platform.
Once hypothetical, this scenario is now materializing. The problem of AI Overviews and AI chatbots meaningfully reducing referral traffic has been discussed for a while now, with reports showing click-through rates dropping by roughly 47.5 percent on desktop and 37.7 percent on mobile on queries where an AI Overview appears. Although publishers face the general problem of finding a new, workable model to be fairly compensated in the AI era, Google’s longstanding dominance in web search uniquely positions it to advance or derail the finding of such a solution.
Google’s new updates are a clear step toward entrenching Google Zero as the new reality of web access. With more AI answers by default for every Google search, the click-outward becomes optional, and users have all the more reason to simply stay where they are.
Additionally, Google’s “information agents” will travel across the web, constantly scraping data according to the user's personal interests even when the user isn’t actively using search. Thus, the user isn’t going out into the web. Instead, the information is coming to the user, readymade, personalized and summarized.
On the one hand, this is certainly convenient and opens new possibilities for users. On the other hand, this raises certain concerns about the future of the open web, meaning the part of the internet that is publicly accessible without payment or behind login credentials.
Is the Open Web in Decline?
The clearest concern with Google Zero is that it seems as if it will only deepen the problems facing publishers. Without the traffic, there is no ad revenue, and without that, there’s no incentive to publish. This dynamic may diminish the overall quality of web content and its versatility. Meanwhile, the value of doing business online is likely to become increasingly concentrated in the hands of big corporations, Google first and foremost, while others get breadcrumbs at best.
Another issue that’s becoming more apparent now is related to user experience. The web is gradually becoming less a place users explore and more something that comes to them through a single surface. Some observers have described the new experience as a more enclosed version of the internet, akin to a gated community.
The problem here is not just about nostalgia for the old web. Personalization is, to an extent, convenient and good for the user. But when all the information we receive gets filtered through a single company, we lose the main benefit of the open web: the opportunity to encounter many different, unfiltered ideas and worldviews, and to maybe learn something unexpected.
In a statement some called a Freudian slip, Google itself has admitted that the open web is in decline, although the company later clarified that it meant only the market for ads appearing on websites. To make this decline convincingly deniable or reversible, however, mere statements won’t be enough.
How Can We Protect the Open Web?
Protecting the best that the web has to offer while reaping the benefits of AI search requires certain actions from various interest groups.
1. Go to the Source
One single, simple step that users and businesses alike can take is to check the information at its original source. This need not be motivated only by a sense of wonder or desire to help the website. AI interfaces can summarize the web, but you might still want to verify the information for yourself. Also, by digging deeper into the context at the source rather than by chatting with AI, you might get the raw, unfiltered and uniquely presented perspective that the web thrives on.
2. Create Fair Rules for Scalable Data Access
For businesses and organizations who need web data at scale, the underlying web page still matters. In sectors where prices, availability, regulation or reputation move quickly, decisions still depend on directly observing public information, not just a synthesized response. Pricing teams, market researchers, fraud and risk teams, analysts and brand teams need to collect large amounts of data or monitor the websites directly.
What matters for such companies is that the same rules that apply to Google when retrieving information for the websites would apply to them. This way, they might compete and possibly provide certain services better than Google’s. Otherwise, a monopoly over web data becomes hard to avoid.
3. Adapt to AI Search
For most companies, the sensible response is to plan for the shift rather than fight it. That usually means treating AI surfaces as a real channel and measuring presence inside them, using generative engine optimization (GEO) tools. Besides optimizing content to be clear, authoritative and unique, audit your website and make sure it is technically accessible to AI when you want it to be. For example, a soon-to-be-released Oxylabs Web Openness Index shows that anti-automation friction and poor data interoperability sometimes prevent websites from sharing data with AI crawlers even when they wish to.
Further, businesses should focus on investing in original information that is hard to summarize without losing value, as well as building direct audience relationships through newsletters, communities, podcasts and apps and making sure the team responsible for monitoring the open web has the tools and data access to do that reliably. This includes AI searchability tools, such as Profound or Trendos, as well as more traditional brand monitoring tools such as Brand24 or Mention.
4. Give Credit Where It’s Due
Finally, for Google, it is crucial to send more traffic elsewhere and let websites grow and thrive. Otherwise, it’s just cutting the branch on which it sits, and Google Zero might eventually come to mean zero relevant, new perspectives. Thus, Google needs to constantly improve on how it gives credit to the source websites and how its AI agents find unique, interesting content to not only put in front of the user but also to allow that user to explore more of the web.
What Do We Want the Web to Be?
AI isn’t going anywhere and will continue to reshape the web and how we access it. This can be a good thing in many ways, helping users, businesses and researchers more effectively achieve their goals. Similarly, Google providing more capabilities and information on its platform can also be beneficial. The question is, how do we make sure that we get these benefits without eventually losing the much more fundamental value of the open web.
