Aug 11, 2026 13:03 pm IST

Opinion | Google Is Turning The Internet Into Its Own Prison, And Nobody Can Do Anything About It

The company that once sent us across the web now wants to keep us trapped inside its own walls.

Naresh Kaushik Naresh Kaushik Columnist

Naresh Kaushik Columnist

For most of the 21st century, Google played a significant role in web users' lives. Its traditional search engine has served as the engine of the internet. Just before Google went public in 2004, one of its two co-founders, Larry Page, declared in an interview that the company wanted to provide a service by acting as a gateway. "We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible," Page said. For years, the company fulfilled that promise. A search on Google would direct you to 10 blue links to various websites, and in the process, the web thrived, traffic reached ever-new heights, and both Google and web publishers made money. Users benefited from being able to search across alternative websites for their queries.

But now, with its new AI-based search features, the tech giant has almost stopped sending queries to websites. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode answer questions without users needing to leave the page to visit other sites. Google's own services, from shopping to YouTube videos, feature prominently at the top of its results. In May, the company changed its search engine for the first time in 25 years, allowing people to add photos and videos to their queries and to assign AI "agents" to run searches for them. This means users will stay much longer on Google. People are spending up to nine minutes more in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches, according to three studies, tallied by The New York Times. One study from Growth Memo, which the paper quoted, found that in about 75% of cases, users never left Google's AI Mode for the web.

This threatens not only the survival of web publishers but also the future of the internet itself. The web, designed for human clicks, is increasingly used by AI agents and bots. Researchers at the internet service provider Cloudflare reported last month that more than 50% of internet traffic is now non-human, with staggering implications for publishers, content owners, and the future of the open web. They also found that between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites fell by nearly 40%, hurting almost all businesses, from media to retail and IT. Google, with its dominance in search, the Chrome browser, and the world's largest video hosting site, YouTube, virtually controls the web. Globally, Google search has a market share of about 90%; in India, it's 95%.

Last month, Steve Hoffman, the CEO of........

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