Are they lying? Google promises "blue links" are safe from AI, but no one is buying it

Google is heavily on the defensive after a TechCrunch report flatly declared the era of the ten blue links is officially over.

The search giant took to social media to push back against the growing industry panic. The official Google PR account promised that users will absolutely continue to see blue web links and insisted that AI Mode is not the default experience.

Nobody in the independent publishing space actually believes a word of it.

The writing has been on the wall for years. I spelled this out a couple of weeks ago when looking at how Google’s algorithm updates have systematically wiped out independent sites like ours. The traffic collapse following the 2023 Helpful Content Update was intentional and devastating.

Other publishers are feeling the exact same burnout. The founder of Windows Latest just posted a blunt autopsy of his business. He spent a decade watching Google rank random Reddit threads and scraper spam above his actual reporting. He accurately views this new AI push as a funeral for independent tech journalism.

It is not just news blogs getting buried. The team behind Pokémon Central Wiki revealed this week that Google has practically deindexed their entire site. They run one of the largest wikis on the internet and rely on thousands of human volunteers. Check out their full thread below:

Their content has not changed. Bing and DuckDuckGo still index them normally. Google just quietly decided they no longer matter.

SEO experts see right through the corporate PR. Lily Ray pointed out that Google is simply playing the long game. They are slowly conditioning users to type longer, conversational queries. Once people get used to that search behavior, shoving them entirely into AI Mode becomes effortless.

Google wants users to think the open web is perfectly fine. They are telling everyone that traditional search is safe.

The reality on the ground is quite ugly. Google is actively starving the exact same creators and sites that generate the raw information their AI models need to survive.

And with every looming algorithm update, independent publishers are just holding their breaths, hoping Google won’t snap a finger and wipe them out of existence.

Featured image generated with AI

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