Google’s Dominance: The Gateway Becomes a Stranglehold
Google is the most popular website on the entire internet, and it’s not even close. The site accounts for over 100 billion monthly visits, with YouTube (which Google owns) reaching 51 billion. Facebook sits in third place with just 11 billion monthly visits—a fraction of Google’s traffic.
For most people, Google is the beginning, middle, and end of their browsing experience. It’s the portal through which they access information, a mechanism they rarely scrutinize. To most, Google is just a utility. But the sinister reality is that Google has a veritable stranglehold on practically the entire internet, and over the past couple of years, they’ve begun tightening their grip.
The Rise of Google: A Better Service
Google became popular because it provided a better service. In the early days of the internet, search engines like Lycos and Excite dominated but did a mediocre job—incessantly peppered with advertisements, distractions, and poor layouts.
Over time, websites like AltaVista and Yahoo became dominant, but around 2002, the balance shifted overwhelmingly in favor of a cleaner, simpler alternative: Google. The minimalist approach and negative space felt luxurious and respectful of users’ time. Most importantly, it made users feel unimpeded as they accessed the online world.
Google provided the best results by far. What you searched for and what you found typically fit together like puzzle pieces. There was a very good reason why Google became the dominant search platform for the entire internet, controlling nearly 90% of the available market today.
The Advertising Evolution
In the early days, Google didn’t serve advertisements directly. Revenue was modest, but over the past 20 years, advertising now composes well over 80% of Alphabet’s revenue—hundreds of billions of dollars.
While no ads appear on the Google homepage, the company began layering advertisements into actual search results—a far more damaging practice. Google systematically updates and optimizes these “in search” advertisements, harvesting obscene amounts of money for displaying certain brands at the top of results.
The Disappearing Ad Labels
The way Google showcases brands has evolved deceptively over time:
- 2013 and before: Advertisements contained prominently visible, wide yellow banners
- Wide, bold yellow became smaller, subtle yellow
- Yellow became green banners next to green text
- Solid green became green outlines
- 2019: Green outlines became tiny, dark grey labels
Google claimed this new design helped users “better understand where information is coming from,” but the real effect was making advertisements harder to distinguish from organic results.
The Financial Incentive
When Google makes it harder to tell which pages are sponsored advertisements, there’s a noticeable increase in traffic generated. After Google’s most recent changes:
- Nina Hale found clicks on ads increased by 17%
- Jumpshot and Sparktoro saw a 15% increase in mobile ad clicks
Google operates its advertising business as Pay Per Click (PPC), meaning they only make money if someone clicks the ad. This directly incentivizes Google to put as many paid links as possible and make it difficult for users to distinguish between paid and organic results.
The Zero Click Phenomenon
According to a study by Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro, approximately 60% of Google queries are now “Zero Click Searches” where users don’t click a single additional website. While this might seem convenient for quick questions like restaurant hours, the introduction of complex, long-form AI summaries threatens the entire web ecosystem.
AI Summaries: The Content Cannibals
Google’s new AI summary feature displays comprehensive answers alongside search queries. For example, searching “What is the best wood for chainsaw carving” returns a huge AI summary of soft woods, hard woods, and considerations—all scraped from websites that would normally receive that traffic.
According to Alphabet’s Q1 2024 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai stated they’ve “already served billions of queries with generative AI features” and are seeing “increased user satisfaction with the results.”
The Death of Small Websites
Consider a website like beavercrafttools.com, which has a detailed post about wood carving from 2022. Previously, users would navigate to their site, read the article, and potentially purchase products. Now, their information becomes a footnote in an AI summary displayed above advertisements and sponsored brands.
According to Backlinko’s analysis of 4 million Google searches, only 0.63% of users click to the second page. The overwhelming majority browse only page 1, now increasingly dominated by:
- AI summaries scraped from actual websites
- Sponsored websites that pay Google directly
- Advertisements disguised as organic results
The Negative Feedback Loop
The “Zero Click Internet Wasteland” creates a negative feedback loop where:
- Summary services regurgitate information from real websites
- Traffic, sales, clicks, and ad revenue funnel to top-paying websites
- Smaller businesses and pages starve for traffic
- Content creators lose incentive to create original material
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, warned during a Council on Foreign Relations summit: “The business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change, because more and more the answers to questions won’t lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source. And if content creators can’t derive value from what they’re doing, then they’re not going to create original content.”
From Portal to Window
Google has transformed from a portal to the internet into a window. Previously, people would open Google and step through to explore the web. Now, users increasingly browse without ever clicking through, undermining the entire premise of how the online world has operated.
For Google, it’s beneficial in the short term. For everyday users, it provides convenience—also short term. But the long-term impact means fewer unique user-generated content businesses can operate successfully. AI search results are self-cannibalizing, eating the very content they’re built on.
The Internet’s Future
The “Zero Click Internet” represents a content wasteland where individuals and small businesses have little motive to post original material. Their content gets scraped, parroted, and reposted as AI overviews, benefiting everyone except the original author:
- Users get convenience
- Paying customers get traffic
- Google gets money
- Original content creators get nothing
In a twisted irony, the company that originally opened access to the online world for hundreds of millions is now single-handedly strangling it. The zero click internet isn’t just a trend—it’s an existential threat to the web as we know it.
