Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI
Google's AI Mode is rapidly growing, with over one billion monthly users. Critics argue that this shift is leading to a decline in the quality of Google Search, as it prioritizes keeping users within its ecosystem. The integration of AI features is seen as a factor contributing to this degradation, affecting clickthrough rates for traditional search results.
- ▪Google's AI Mode queries have more than doubled every quarter since its launch.
- ▪The quality of Google Search has reportedly declined, with users feeling it is designed to keep them on Google-owned properties.
- ▪AI Overviews have resulted in a 58 percent lower average clickthrough rate for top-ranking pages.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | www.theregister.com - Articles |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/25/google-is-cannibalizing-the-web-to-feed-ai/5244641 |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 14:25:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T12:27:36.700Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T13:01:55.455Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | oB6XwKJi0EhF |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); AI + ML Google is cannibalizing the web to feed AI Google Search used to direct users to web sites; AI Mode will keep them in Google's garden Thomas Claburn Thomas Claburn Senior reporter Published mon 25 May 2026 // 13:25 UTC OPINION At Google's I/O 2026 developer conference last week, the company's Search VP Liz Reid celebrated the rapid growth of AI Mode, which Google refers to as its end-to-end AI search experience. External observers refer to it as simply as the end of search.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at www.theregister.com - Articles.
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