From Puck, May 22:
Agentic search will, at least in theory, spell doom for many of the billions of sites on the open web, and usher in a strange back-end micropayment marketplace where agents trade commissions piecemeal. But is that theory undervaluing the power of people and the publishers who know how to connect with them?
Earlier this week, on a sunny California morning outside Google’s Mountain View headquarters, C.E.O. Sundar Pichai stood onstage at the company’s annual developers’ conference and offered an unsurprising but nevertheless startling declaration. He proudly touted that search, the business on which the company’s $4.6 trillion market cap was built 30 years ago, was getting an update for the A.I. future. Longtime head of search Liz Reid followed up with the details: Google A.I. will now attempt to personalize each search prompt with follow-up questions, and throw all of the relevant information into an interactive on-page box with a roundup of links on the side.In other words, a question like “where is the World Cup” might yield a result that ties in a user’s Google Maps, Google Wallet, YouTube, and previous search history as it becomes “where is the World Cup, what are some of the lowest ticket prices, and which New Jersey transit option is the best for me if I’m coming from my apartment in Brooklyn.” What once spurred 10 blue links to other websites will now surface more YouTube Shorts and ads. Technologists cheered. Publishers passed the antacids once again.This was further confirmation that we’ve fully entered the era of Google Zero, a term coined by The Verge’s Nilay Patel in 2024 to describe the looming death of search traffic. Google, Facebook, and X have all moved away from sending traffic out to the sea of websites that power the open web in an effort to grow their own walled gardens, evolving from advertising intermediaries to something like publishers themselves. The shift in strategy contributed to Alphabet’s nearly $90 billion in services revenue last quarter alone, driven by a near 20 percent growth in search.Publishers, most of which have already spent the better part of the past decade on the back foot, are pivoting once again. Jonah Peretti, who recently announced he was selling BuzzFeed to Byron Allen, has said that most of the growth from loyal readers now comes from user-generated games. The New York Times is growing, largely based on its bundled games and cooking extensions. At CNN, Mark Thompson’s response to the collapse of cable and the open web is a weather app. James Murdoch’s acquisition of Vox Media and New York magazine seems largely about the podcast network, and the potential for its affinity-driven model to slot into his growing thought-leader events portfolio. In a TBPN interview last week, Condé Nast C.E.O. Roger Lynch grabbed some easy headlines with his revelation that he’d recently told his underlings to act as if search were already fully dead. (Good luck with all that, Chloe, Mark, and Adam!)The past 18 months have been particularly telling. By mid-2025, the number of queries that resulted in zero clicks had increased from 60 percent at the beginning of the year to nearly 70 percent, while the percentage of traffic referral to Google Gemini and A.I. Overviews exploded. Between April 2025 and April 2026, traffic to Gemini’s website grew by more than 570 percent, per SimilarWeb.Now that Google wants search and Gemini to become even more personalized for the average person, large-scale publishers need to figure out how to monetize the agentic era’s robot crawlers, especially as they continue to deal with the open web’s collapse.Writing for Robots
Building for those crawlers is a daunting and novel task. Most websites are not going to see traffic bounce back to the height of referral in the mid-2010s. That means finding new ways to monetize a smaller pool of readers while also maximizing non-human interfacing opportunities within these new Google (or ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or Claude) boxes. Audience developers have tried to game algorithms in the past through search engine optimization, but the new world order requires trying to predict the follow-up to an initial prompt, and then monetizing off owned-and-operated platforms....
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