Lately, I’ve been having trouble finding stuff in my Gmail inbox. The Search function has become overzealous, jumping to summarize my conversations using artificial intelligence and skipping the actual addresses I’m attempting to search. It’s not just e-mail accounts, though; search is in crisis everywhere. Google Maps guesses where I want to go at a given time of day instead of simply listing places I’ve just searched for. When I try to use Google Search, the A.I.-overview function sometimes occupies my entire browser window, generating its own, not always correct, answers rather than directing me to relevant websites. Full-on A.I. mode skips the old blue links entirely.

Search has gotten so annoying, in fact, that it has become a problem for Google’s very business model. Companies pay Google to splash ads into search results that are relevant to their businesses—advertising stoves, say, to someone searching for kitchen-renovation tips. More than half of Google’s revenue comes from those ads. But, if users aren’t clicking through to external sites, because they’re relying on A.I. to answer their queries, then the ads that Google hosts are suddenly much less valuable. In a recent earnings call, Google’s chief business officer, Philipp Schindler, admitted that the company has been seeing “lower monetization” on A.I. searches. After the call, the stock of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fell by nearly a quarter, down five hundred billion dollars, the largest single-day drop in its history. Even Google may not be too big to fail, as pessimism mounts about the possibility of Search ever again working the way it used to.

Just as Google has faltered in Search, use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has surged. OpenAI’s consumer-product lead, Adam Fry, recently told the tech journalist Alex Kantrowitz that ChatGPT is siphoning users away from the older company: over the past year and a half, it has grown to handle one-fifth the volume of “search-like queries” that Google does. This acceleration only makes sense: a growing number of people now rely on A.I. chatbots as their primary windows to the internet, and they’re less likely to click out of those apps to ask the kinds of simple questions that they might once have turned to Google to answer. It doesn’t help that bots have lately grown much better at browsing the internet in real time, using virtual browsers and plug-ins, rather than simply generating answers from preëxisting data. Google has its own suite of A.I. products, Gemini, but they’ve lagged in popularity behind Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT. The investment firm Menlo Ventures found that Gemini accounts for only nine per cent of A.I. spending for businesses in 2026, down from twenty-one per cent last year.

Can the internet as we know it survive without a reliable flood of search traffic? Chatbots treat websites as databases of information to draw from, but since they divert traffic from those sites they don’t provide much impetus for creators to keep posting new content. The end state we’re heading toward seems to be an internet both generated and traversed by bots—in which case, it will no longer matter how annoying it is for a mere human being to find information. Some websites are already moving defensively to keep out the trawling bots attempting to digest their content. Reddit, one of the internet’s major remaining repositories of human-generated knowledge and opinions, is moving toward “a primarily logged-in experience,” as its C.E.O., Steve Huffman, recently announced. In a third-quarter letter to shareholders, Huffman noted that Reddit’s search traffic “dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week” during October. The letter explained, “Web search is evolving from a gateway to the web to becoming an AI-powered destination itself.” In a recent earnings call, Huffman said that “people still want Reddit” but that “Google is not sending them to Reddit the way they used to.” Requiring users to log in is the equivalent of pulling up the drawbridge to keep away the A.I. models roaming outside. But it also means that the casual human searcher will be less likely to see the full conversations happening on Reddit.