By rebuilding its engine around AI, Google now answers questions without referring to sites. Officially, to better serve you.
On May 19, at its I/O conference, Google has carried out the most profound transformation of its engine since its creation. The search bar, almost unchanged since 1998, has been completely redesigned around AI. AI Mode, powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, becomes the default experience where available. Search no longer just returns a list of links: it generates answers, dashboards, mini-applications, and deploys agents capable of comparing, booking and purchasing for you. Head of Search, Liz Reid, summed it up bluntly: end-to-end AI search.
Translation for brands: the Internet user no longer goes out. He asks his question, gets his answer, and stays inside. This is called the end of the click. And before gushing over the technical prowess, it’s worth asking a simple question: who benefits?
The free door closes
The numbers don’t leave much room for doubt. According to a Seer Interactive analysis of more than 25 million impressions, 93% of AI Mode queries do not generate any clicks to an external site. AI Previews now appear on nearly half of searches, according to BrightEdge and Ahrefs, and drive organic click-through rates anywhere from 15% to 61% depending on the query. Major American media outlets have lost almost half of their search traffic in three years.
For a brand, it is the progressive collapse of the most profitable channel there is: natural referencing. This “free” traffic that Google has distributed for twenty-five years in exchange for good content is drying up, because the response is now served before the click. The content is always sucked in, synthesized, restored. Quite simply, no one goes to the source anymore.
The paying door widens
This is the detail that should attract attention. While free clicks disappear, paid clicks thrive.
Advertising appears in about 25% of AI-generated results today, up from nearly 3% in early 2025. A technical analysis of AI Mode traffic conducted by Discovered Labs uncovered ready-made advertising infrastructure — a placement called “AI Mode Bottom Ads,” an attribution system that already tracks conversions in the background, and more than 800 active experiment IDs. In other words, advertising auctions are already operating in the shadow of AI Mode; All that remains is to flip the switch.
And Google doesn’t stop at display. With its “Direct Offers”, brands like Chewy, Gap or L’Oréal see their promotions built by Gemini and slipped into the process, up to the integrated payment without leaving the screen. Search becomes a marketplace where AI assembles the offer and collects the transaction. Remember that Search generated $63 billion in revenue in the last quarter of 2025 alone. This is not a business that Google intends to let erode.
Put the two movements side by side. On the one hand, we are stifling free access to a brand. On the other hand, we are industrializing the paid route. This asymmetry is, in itself, the whole question.
Should we see a plan?
Let’s be honest: nothing proves a deliberate intention to sabotage the organic to sell advertising. And several arguments go against this reading.
First, Google remains subject to real competition. An engine saturated with ads and short on good answers would push users towards ChatGPT or Perplexity. Google therefore has every interest in monetizing with restraint, this is the strategy that several observers attribute to it: “monetize lightly” to suffocate its competitors over time rather than cashing in everything straight away. Then, regulatory pressure is strong: it is precisely because of neighboring rights and European law that France remains, for the moment, excluded from the deployment of AI Mode. Finally, one piece of data qualifies the picture: on branded queries, AI Previews would even increase the click rate, by around 18%.
But we can make both ends meet. There is no need for a conspiracy for a result to be structural. When a company derives most of its revenue from advertising, designs a product that captures the response instead of distributing it, and simultaneously deploys the infrastructure to monetize that response, the direction of the slope is clear, whatever the stated intentions. We don’t blame a toll for existing. We only observe that the free road next to it is narrowing.
The real question for a brand
The reflex would be to be outraged against Google. It’s useless, and it doesn’t change anything. The right question is not “what is Google up to”. It’s: “How much of my customer relationship do I really own, and how much of it am I renting out at an auction?”
As long as your acquisition is based entirely on the traffic that Google is willing to grant you, you are a tenant. And the rent just went up. The only lasting solution is to build what does not depend on it: an audience that you have, a brand request that people formulate through your name, a presence in other sources that the AI cites, the communities, the media, the places where people talk about you without you having paid for it.
It’s the same thread as for fake reviews or for Reddit : we do not rent our visibility indefinitely, we build it ourselves. Google has just made this truth much more expensive to ignore.
