Report: Google AI Mode keeps users on Google, and the web is paying the price

Google’s expansion of AI-powered search is raising fresh concerns that the company could weaken the open web by keeping users inside its own products. Kate Conger reports for The New York Times that publishers, retailers and other website operators are seeing search traffic fall as Google provides more answers directly through AI.

Google’s AI Mode replaces conventional lists of links with conversational responses generated by its Gemini model. The company has also added image and video queries, along with AI agents that can perform searches for users. Google says people submit queries that are three times longer in AI Mode than in traditional search.

Several studies cited by the Times indicate that users spend between one and nine additional minutes in AI Mode. One study by Growth Memo finds that users did not leave AI Mode for the wider web in roughly 75 percent of sessions. Google disputes that finding, arguing that the research uses a small and unrepresentative sample.

Traffic losses reshape publishing

Cloudflare says more than half of web traffic is now nonhuman, meaning it comes from bots rather than people. It reports that human traffic to business websites in finance, publishing and retail fell by almost 40 percent between June 2025 and April 2026.

Wikipedia has also felt the shift. The Wikimedia Foundation says human visits declined 8 percent over the past year while automated systems increasingly scrape its content for AI training. The foundation now promotes its own app and social channels and charges AI companies, including Google, for training-data access.

Google says its AI search features still send billions of clicks to websites each week and include links to external sources. It has added website previews, preferred-source settings and publisher tools. But critics argue that links shown beside a complete AI answer are less likely to generate visits.

UK competition regulators have required Google to give publishers clearer attribution links and an option to exclude their content from AI summaries. For publishers, the dispute is becoming a business issue as much as a technical one: if AI systems answer users’ questions without sending them onward, the traffic that supports online content may continue to shrink.