Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.
At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview. On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.
In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.
This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).
We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.
Hellbound and Down 