Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers

Publishers, politics, and the value of news

• Some argue politicians failed to protect independent media over 25 years; others counter that politicians dislike independent reporting and rarely benefit from truly objective coverage.
• There’s disagreement over whether media even deserve protection: some see them as a vital “fourth estate,” others as captured by capital, chasing engagement, and losing courage since big episodes like Snowden.
• Suggestions range from more public/national media (with democratic oversight) to the view that ad-supported journalism is inherently compromised but still practically necessary.

How and why users are shifting to AI

• Many commenters now use chatbots for: quick factual updates, simple “what time is X” queries, and extracting key points from bloated, ad-heavy articles.
• Others use AI as a meta-tool to improve Google queries, or as a first pass (especially via social media discovery) before going to news sites for verification.
• Some say “AI search” is just more convenient than clicking through multiple SEO pages; a minority insists they still want pure, traditional search.

Google’s incentives, search decline, and AI pivot

• Widespread sentiment that Google degraded search over a decade: more ads, worse ranking, SEO spam, loss of reliable advanced operators.
• Many see AI summaries as the next step in Google keeping users on its own pages, after infoboxes and built-in tools like calculators.
• Others frame this as an unavoidable “Innovator’s Dilemma”: if Google hadn’t done AI overviews, Perplexity/OpenAI/Arc would, and news sites would be crushed by those intermediaries instead.

Impact on publishers and SEO-driven content

• Several note that the first traffic to die is low-value SEO content: recipe spam, “what time is the Super Bowl” posts, overlong listicles and calculators designed only to sell ads or capture leads.
• Some are openly glad such sites lose traffic; others worry that if content producers can’t monetize, future LLMs will have nothing high-quality to summarize.
• There’s debate whether AI overviews are the main cause of traffic decline; one thread points out that the downtrend predates mass LLM adoption, with social media, paywalls, and trust erosion also blamed.

Trust, accuracy, and looming “enshittification” of AI

• Experiences with Google’s AI answers range from “indispensable” to “wrong ~50% of the time,” especially on niche or fresh topics; many say they always double-check.
• Some see AI as less manipulable than single human editors; others highlight prompt injection, hidden “editorial” layers, and persuasive presentation that users over-trust.
• Many predict ads and paid placement will infiltrate chatbot answers, recreating Google-style incentives and potentially worsening quality.

Business models, paywalls, and the open web

• Strong frustration with hard paywalls for single articles; people want a frictionless, per-article or aggregate payment system, but past attempts have mostly failed.
• Suggestions include subscription bundles (Apple News+), indie/ad-free models, and microtransaction standards between AI agents and publishers.
• Several fear the shift to closed platforms and exclusive data deals will further shrink the open web; others argue open models and local inference may eventually counterbalance that trend.