Noted: The AIpocalypse is here for web sites as search referrals plunge (via Fronted Dogma).
While organic Google search results have been deteriorating for a long time, Gemini summaries, however bizarre and inaccurate, also form Google’s latest tactic for stealing information and the labour that produces it – the Googlefication of the web.
An “organic” search result is one that hasn’t been paid-for, or isn’t a summary presented by Google. You’ll know it as the traditional blue link to the website where your answer lives. It’s all you probably want from your search:
It’s worth noting that Google has been extracting content from web pages and displaying it as a summary within results for years. For example, when I managed the Suffolk Libraries website, searching for a branch would return a card in the results page sidebar, with an address, contact number and opening hours, thereby removing the need to visit the site. Of course, often these were wrong, so Google set up Google Business listings so you could create an account, login and do their fact-checking and corrections for them.
Over time, Google also purposefully blurred the distinction between paid-for and organic results, which means organisations often have to pay to appear on results pages where they should just be the first result. For example, if someone wants to find out about the Psychology course at UEA, a search for Psychology at UEA should just put a link to UEA’s Psychology degree page above any other results. But UEA’s ad comes first on the results page, because it knows that competing universities will pay for their ad to appear in results for that search term:
Enter a more specific search term, and Gemini summaries kick in. Your simple organic result that points to the page where you’ll actually find the information is virtually invisible. Here’s what you get when you search for what will I study for Psychology at UEA?:
The summary may provide enough (possibly accurate) information, which means whoever entered the search term doesn’t then click through to the UEA page. Web managers might see lower click through ratios (CTRs) in Google Search Console. Everything takes place on Google’s servers, which means Google owns the information, the fruit of the labour that produced it.
In summary and Gemini world, we’re all just working for Google (unless we stop it indexing our sites) – except now we won’t have to login to correct errors, because they’re just a part of AI, a post-truth price worth paying, apparently. So the information’s value ultimately lies in its capacity to stop visitors from leaving Google World, rather than its accuracy or interest.
Perhaps this represents the latest effort in Google’s strategy to create an intermediary layer on top of the web which will ultimately enclose it. Where AMP failed, maybe Gemini won’t.