SFGate columnist Drew Magary criticized Google’s full-scale AI transformation of search, announced at Google I/O, in a May 28 article. Magary noted that Google has placed AI Overviews above all search results, and users must manually switch to the “Web” filter in a submenu to get plain web link results. The next step announced at last week’s I/O is to have the Gemini AI answer nearly all queries directly, completely eliminating external links — which he calls the “search engine optimizing for itself.” He revealed that after Google’s algorithm deprioritized external links, media sites like SFGATE saw their traffic plummet by more than a quarter overnight. If this transformation is fully implemented, it would sever the last channel through which publishers, small businesses, and students can be discovered and connected via search engines.
Magary compared this process to Facebook and X’s throttling of external links over the years — locking users inside the platform rather than directing them to explore outside content — considering Google’s approach an extreme version of the same logic, and called for the government to force its breakup. He also acknowledged a “collective naivete” on the user side: people have long treated Google as a neutral information utility, never expecting it would treat human writing and ideas as a “depreciated asset” to be replaced. At the end of the article, Magary mentioned that alternative search tools like DuckDuckGo are gaining more users, and expressed “a glimmer of hope” that the “AI hype will eventually fade.”