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If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the site’s “about” page saying, “Local journalism has been quietly consolidated and hollowed out.” Carrasco’s statement did not note the role of Carrasco’s own industry in that decline, nor did it acknowledge the irony in choosing this name for a website based on a technology that steals and repackages the intellectual output of others.

The Dissent’s website, which currently appears to be down, even included a masthead with bios for its non-human “staff” (the AI agents whose names appear alongside articles). Neighborhood “reporter” Casey Wong (who is not a real person) has a bio that reads, “I notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who’s just moved in.” Of course, there’s no mention of how an AI agent might glean that information, but (actual) news outlet Mission Local has noted that, to fill its pages, The Dissent relies heavily on summarizing the work published in other sites by real human journalists.

Once, The San Francisco Standard reported, The Dissent did appear to follow up on a tip in a Reddit thread to break a story about a business closing, but “the agent appears to have hallucinated the claim that it had reached out to the owner for comment.”

The development of an AI newsroom in San Francisco, which is home to many of the tech billionaires attempting to reshape society, is certainly concerning for those of us who care about journalism. But The Dissent is not the only news outlet to have tried using AI to crib the journalism of real human workers. These AI newsrooms get a decent share of attention, and their harms are critical to point out. But they are also part of a broader problem: the undermining of how we share and receive factual information.

Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that could further destabilize the already precarious journalism industry by using its infamous search feature to prioritize AI summaries from Google Gemini, rather than directing people toward external links to news outlets like ours.

Google’s New AI-Fueled Search Bar Threatens to Further Upend Journalism Industry

You might not have noticed the deep scale of this change, but you probably have noticed what writer Cory Doctorow refers to as the “enshittification” of Google search — the preponderance of spam, the push toward sponsored results, and the overwhelming sense that the internet no longer works the way it once did.

On June 9, when we sounded the alarm about the increased AI implementation within Google’s search function and the suppression of journalism that would surely result, it was too early to know exactly how much these changes would impact Truthout. Google had announced the changes on May 19 and we were still collecting data.

Before the change, our traffic from Google was 27 percent of our overall traffic: Exactly 2,604,280 people visited Truthout via Google in 2025. Given our experience with Facebook traffic abruptly declining by 90 percent in 2018, following sudden changes in the social media platform’s algorithm (including for example, Facebook’s decision to no longer regularly show Truthout’s posts to the more than 800,000 people who had followed Truthout’s page out of a desire to see them), it seemed reasonable to worry about losing as much as half our Google traffic. In our June op-ed, we wrote, “If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.”

At the time, we were hopeful that it wouldn’t be that bad. After all, wasn’t Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil”?

We later learned, however, that Google has quietly stepped back from its infamous motto, even removing it from the opening lines of its Code of Conduct while its parent company, Alphabet, Inc., ignores it entirely.

We now have three full months of data since Google’s change, and the numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.

We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate........

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