From Gateway to Gatekeeper: How Google Broke Its Own Ecosystem

Google has entered the wrong game molding Search into an AI Overview mash up of Gemini and old search.

Competing with ChatGPT should have been left to Gemini alone.

Search should stay in its early 2023 form.

1. Publishers gaining traffic and spending forever on SEO, Google News, and Discover

2. Ecommerce supplementing PPC traffic with designated landing pages, Google Keyword Planner research, Schema and meta optimization

3. SaaS businesses producing tutorials, educational content, guides, reviews, comparison reports for SERP

4. Service providers investing in extensive reports, long-form content, better internal structure

And everyone else competing for attention and place in search – plus, additional Google Ads on top.

With AI Overviews, Google has penetrated the zero click territory, making the entire purpose of the SERP obsolete.

As a result, using Google vs. SearchGPT vs. the other real time online search models is… direct competition and no gain.

Pissing off everyone who relied on search FOR DECADES leads to distributed attention across Facebook and Instagram, reddit, Quora, optimizing for zero-click search, listings, G2, Capterra, Clutch… And other individual properties.

Fresh content is now gated. Why let AI crawlers scrape it when there’s zero gain for the brand?

Moving to paywalls, newsletters, paid communities instead.

Google’s competitive edge in “providing scraped data” is losing its touch daily. OpenAI has long scraped anything there is, and keep cruising the index in the same fashion. Grok, Claude, and other LLMs will follow.

Google – revert Search to its form 24 months back and the entire ecosystem will back you up.