AI Overviews: The Threat to Blogs and Reference Websites
Google I/O 2026 felt like one of the most significant versions of the company’s annual product showcase in a long time. There were many announcements at the event – no fewer than 100 major ones according to Google itself – ranging from new Gemini-powered “Googlebook” laptops to the intelligent Universal Cart shopping cart.
Yet, the main takeaway was that Google would be making the most fundamental changes to the product that it built its success on, Google Search. The company announced wholesale changes, “reimagining Search with AI,” which would represent the biggest changes in 25 years. It’s going to focus much more on AI Mode, i.e., the conversational search with Gemini.
Google is pushing users to AI Mode
The upshot is quite simple: Google will nudge you into a conversation about your search results instead of a list of links to websites. It is basically an extension of the current AI Overviews that greet some search queries today. Google maintains that you will still get the list of websites, though that, in itself, isn’t the issue for now. The main concern is that Google’s changes could lead to lower traffic for some websites.
The best way to consider it is like placing a product on a shelf in a grocery store. Google’s AI overviews and Intelligent Search features will be in your eyeline, whereas traditional website links will be on the bottom shelf; still there but harder to find.
Of course, it depends on the type of search you conduct. Most “doing” search results will still nudge you toward a website. For example, if you googled “watch movies on Netflix “ or looked for a sweepstakes casino online, the results will take you to your intended destination. It’s not the kind of query that opens up a conversation with an AI bot.
Blogs and reference websites could be hurt
On the other hand, queries like “who was the 35th President?” or “authentic lasagna recipe” will naturally lean into the AI Mode conversation. For the former, you’ll inevitably get the answer (John F. Kennedy) and AI mode will both provide you with the information and nudge you into a conversation to find out more.
You can see from the results above that there are results on the right, which you could click to enter a site like Wikipedia or the JFK Library. But the fear for these websites is that the basic information is already there. For instance, you would not need to go to Wikipedia to get info like Kennedy’s D.O.B or basic information on his assassination.
Big platforms like Wikipedia will probably be okay, though they may take a hit in traffic, but smaller information sites, such as blogs, might run into more headwinds. It’s the reason we gave the example of a lasagna recipe. The information can be presented succinctly by AI, and it is, indeed, the kind of thing that instigates follow-up questions and a conversation.
The issue at hand, then, is what happens to that Italian cookery blog? Fewer clicks mean less advertising revenue and other incentives to keep creating content, and they also carry the risk of creating a knowledge vacuum. If humans aren’t constantly putting information online, such as traditional food recipes, then there is a risk that the knowledge available to AI will become stale. Yes, you can argue that AI will evolve to perhaps exceed human knowledge, even in areas like cooking, but it’s not certain, and we most certainly are not at that point yet.
New revenue models may be adopted
So, what’s the answer? Well, first of all, we need to see how the internet reacts to Google’s changes. Not everyone likes AI Mode, and people are voting with their installs and uninstalls: Rival search engines saw a surge in downloads the week of Google I/O. Google is always going to be influential in the search engine sector, but its dominance is not guaranteed to last forever.
There are suggestions that the web economy could be changed to accommodate AI. For instance, what if instead of receiving ad revenue each time a user visits your website, you receive revenue when an AI web crawler scrapes your content? Or you receive revenue if your content was used to form part of an AI Overview? These ideas should not seem outlandish, and companies like Cloudflare have already begun to explore the idea.
Yet for now, we should be cautious. The transformation of search and discovery, even if it is staggered, will upend the pillars of the web we have become accustomed to over the last 25-30 years. Products evolve, but there are usually winners and losers when they do.
Great analysis, Haider! The point you raised about a potential 'knowledge vacuum' is a massive concern. If creators stop putting fresh data online because there’s no ad revenue, AI models will eventually burn out on stale training data.
The shift from traditional ad revenue to monetization via AI web crawlers (like Cloudflare is exploring) seems like the only logical bridge. Do you think smaller indie publishers will have enough leverage to demand payouts from LLM providers, or will that luxury be limited to giants like Wikipedia and Reddit?
What I keep wondering is whether the real risk is losing traffic or losing the feedback loop that created the content in the first place.
Traffic can move around.
The harder question is what happens when fewer people have a reason to publish the information AI depends on.
The sites that get hurt are the ones that only ever rented traffic from Google. AI Overviews flatten commodity 'what is X' content, but they can't replicate a point of view, proprietary data, or a community, so the real move is building direct distribution (email, audience, a product) instead of optimizing for clicks you never owned. I'd treat this as a forcing function to stop renting attention and start owning it.
The grocery store analogy is so accurate. If you’re building a web product or a niche site today and your entire distribution strategy is just "hope Google ranks me," you’re playing a losing game. When traditional links get pushed to the bottom shelf, organic traffic is going to tank for small players. It really forces indie builders to focus on building a direct audience—through newsletters, bookmarks, or direct word-of-mouth—instead of just chasing keywords.
This feels like a continuation of a trend that’s already been happening, just more aggressive now.
Search is basically shifting from “list of sources” to “one synthesized answer,” and that changes the incentive structure for websites. If AI Mode becomes the default, a lot of traffic that used to go to informational pages will get absorbed before the click even happens.
That said, not all traffic disappears equally. Transactional and high-intent searches will still push users to sites. The biggest impact will be on content that exists mainly to answer simple questions.
So it’s less “SEO is dead” and more “the value moves from ranking pages to being the source AI trusts and cites.”
Running a couple of content sites through the last year of updates, the thing that matches my own numbers is how uneven the hit is. The queries that basically evaporated were the single-fact ones, the "who was the 35th president" type, where the answer box just ends the search.
What held up, and in a few cases grew, were comparisons, "is X down right now", troubleshooting, and first-hand reviews. Those are the searches where someone wants a person who has used the thing and will say what broke, and an overview stitched from three blog posts doesn't cover that.
So the move that worked for us was shifting the content mix toward decision and experience stuff and away from plain reference, since reference is what AI Mode eats first. The other thing I'd push anyone to do this year is get readers onto an email list or some channel you own while the clicks still exist, because the traffic Google sends is rented and that lease is getting renegotiated in front of us. I wouldn't count on the pay-per-crawl idea bailing out small sites either, that needs the entire ad economy to rewrite itself in your favor.
AI mode feature ,and it affecting how we search, interacts with the web really and mostly depends on the users ,which you have cited (it depends on the vote,which are being decided by the installs and uninstalls).
But I guess it will still affect the blogs rankings and page visits in latter years