OPEN WEB OPTS : A.I. PRIME ESSAY

SINCE last year - Google, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced A.I. Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot.

Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. ''agents'' to run searches for them.

The effect of these moves is becoming clear : People are spending more time with Google than ever.

Users are writing queries three times as long as the keyword-heavy questions they asked of traditional searches, Google said at its developer conference in May.

People are spending one to 9 more minutes in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches, according to three studies from researchers tallied by The New York Times.

One October study from Growth Meme, a newsletter focused on search and marketing found that in about 75 percent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web.

For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search.

Google users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I. generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites.

Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of the technology website The Verge, has warned publishers for years that they would face '' Google Zero '', a moment when traffic from Google would plummet to nothing.

'' For publishers, Google Zero is already here, '' he said. '' It wasn't until AI Mode arrived that people could see that the slow creep was about to hit a tipping point.''

The changes threaten the open web and show how rapidly A.I. has upended the technology landscape.

Tim Berners Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, had envisioned the web as a tool for global collaboration without borders, where people could launch their own websites and flit freely among sites created by others.

Much of that vision has been clipped away over the years, as tech behemoths like Apple and Meta created '' walled gardens, '' or tech ecosystems where users could get almost everything they needed under one roof.

Now A.I. has indisputably accelerated that trajectory, Mr. Berners-Lee said in a 2024 essay.

Tech companies have built empires that locked users in and were focused on maximising profit instead enhancing public utility, Mr. Berners-Lee wrote.

'' The rapid advancement of A.I. has exacerbated these concerns,'' he added, ''proving that issues on the web are not isolated but rather deeply intertwined with emerging technologies.''

Google has denied that it is endangering the open web. In a blog post last August, Liz Reid, a vice president of search, said that the company's ethos had not changed and that it was sending out a '' relatively stable '' number of clicks numbering in the billions.

Reports of a decline in search traffic were '' inaccurate '' and relied on '' flawed methodologies,'' she said.

!WOW! thanks Kate Conger.