I think the days of Google driving traffic to sites then splitting the advertising revenue (or missing out entirely) are largely over. From Google's point of vi

I think the days of Google driving traffic to sites then splitting the advertising revenue (or missing out entirely) are largely over. From Google's point of view, they are just closing the loop. It is a shame because the mutually beneficial relationship between Google and sites has driven a huge amount of the tech economy. Sometimes this has been bad (and advertising is a scourge for many reasons, I can't believe I am defending it) but in general the web would be a lot less useful if people couldn't make money of advertising. I think long-term sites will stop relying on advertising and go with payments or memberships for information. This will hurt everyone but be disastrous for Google if they cannot spider up-to-date information. It will also hurt the free flow of information that we now enjoy. What is really galling is that with all the impressive AI summaries, the search results themselves seem to be getting a lot worse[0]. Many times I have used Google and the AI summary is pretty good but the actual page the summary is from is buried well down in the search results. Is this something they are doing deliberately to make the AI summary seem more useful? [0] An example I blogged about: https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_overview_but_your_sea.html https://sheep.horse/2025/4/yo_google%2C_thanks_for_the_ai_ov...