In its drive to embrace AI, Google is further concealing the raw material that fuels it, demoting links as it continues to ingest them for abstraction. Google may still retain plenty of attention to monetize and perhaps keep even more of it for itself, now that it doesn’t need to send people elsewhere; in the process, however, it really is starving the web that supplies it with data on which to train and from which to draw up-to-date details. (Or, one might say, putting it out of its misery.)
If I had to guess, the future of Google search looks more like AI Overviews than AI mode — a jumble of widgets and modules including and united by AI-generated content, rather than a clean break — if only for purposes of sustaining Google’s multi-hundred-billion-dollar advertising business.
In any case, the signals from Google — despite its unconvincing suggestions to the contrary — are clear: It’ll do anything to win the AI race. If that means burying the web, then so be it.