this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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2026’s Google I/O (Google’s annual developer conference) has been a disaster for the web. The conference-driven development’s forcing through of the Prompt API, a set of Modern Web Guidance skills for AI systems to use that are already showing major accessibility shortcomings, and a whole ton more AI-spangled sloppery, is rushed and unwelcome.
I think the most damaging announcement is the changes coming to Google Search. Rather than a list of relevant links, a search on Google will be more aggressively prioritising the LLM-generated summary, now complete with vibecoded tables, graphs, and interactive elements.
There has until now been a social contract. Website owners let Google scrape their sites and present them in Google Search, and, in exchange, Google Search sends traffic back to those sites. Google wins via adverts on the search page, and sites win due to however they monetise traffic. More largely, everyone wins because there is a financial incentive to create and produce new content.
However, Google killing their side of the contract ends this. If Google only takes and never gives, then sites cannot profit. What is the incentive to publish if the only outcome is feeding Google’s AI with no return? What sources will LLMs have to pull from if all the sources are defunct? How far will Google go folding adverts into their AI output?
I can see the huge short-term gain for Google, but I see no long-term path – not even an unsustainable one. This feels like the end, but of exactly what I’m uncertain.
All of my peers (bar the ones that work at Google) are shattered in a way I’ve never seen before. I don’t know where we go from here.
Stop using it as a start. Stop accepting free with ads as a way to use things you really care about. This model is a guaranteed poisonous route to enshitification. The ads are going to become more nefarious and harder to block / ignore than ever before. Search is important for many of us - pay for it if you can to opt out of ads and personal data collection or support open source efforts.
A lot of people can't afford to pay for every website and webapp they use. Not everyone is in a first-world country with a lot of discretionary income.
WhatsApp (pre Meta acquisition) used to charge $1/year and even that was a barrier for a significant number of users, particularly in developing countries.
The only free models that work are either to use ads, to have a freemium service (where the paid users subsidize the free users), or to have someone else cover the cost for you (which is how it works on most Lemmy servers for example).