The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself | NOEMA

"Typing "lasagna recipe ideas" into Google used to surface a litany of food blogs, each with its own story: a grandmother's family variation, step-by-step photos of ingredients laid out on a wooden table, videos showing technique and a long comment section where readers debated substitutions or shared their own tweaks. Clicking through didn't just deliver instructions; it supported the blogger through ads, affiliate links for cookware or a subscription to a weekly newsletter."

"The same Google search can now yield a neatly packaged "AI Overview," a synthesized recipe stripped of voice, memory and community, delivered without a single user visit to the creator's website. Behind the scenes, their years of work, including their page's text, photos and storytelling, may have already been used to help train or refine the AI model. You get your lasagna, Google gets monetizable web traffic and for the most part, the person who created the recipe gets nothing."

"This isn't hypothetical: More than half of all Google searches in the U.S. and Europe in 2024ended without a click, a report by the market research firm SparkToro estimated. Similarly, the SEO intelligence platform Ahrefs published an analysis of 300,000 keywords in April 2025 and found that when an AI overview was present, the number of users clicking into top-ranked organic search results plunged by an average of more than a third."

Search engines increasingly display AI-generated overviews that synthesize content and deliver answers without sending users to the original creators' sites. This practice uses creators' text, photos and storytelling to train models while diverting ad and traffic revenue away from those creators. Data show over half of Google searches in the U.S. and Europe ended without a click in 2024, and Ahrefs found organic clicks fell over a third when AI overviews were present. The result is diminished incentive for blogging, loss of community features like comments and shared experimentation, and a web that favors convenience over diversity and creator compensation.

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