The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]:
"As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..."
That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more.
I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied. Not always of course, but often enough that I have noticed it.
What a generous euphemism. Depending on the topic, it's not unusual to see Google AI search referencing links that indicate the exact opposite of what it presents in its prose.
So many of these tools are presented as if they're doing something you'd intuitively expect of a human operator, like collating search results and then summarizing them in this case, but the actual operation of them is so alien to us that our intuitions don't apply and these presentations are all but fraudulent.
Because it's presentation cites references, and because those references sometimes reinforce the expression of the AI prose, we grant it trust, but it doesn't use those references in the way a human would and so the relevance of them being cited is radically different (and weaker) than we're accustomed to.
The closest example in human behavior might be the rushed, naive student who just pastes citations into an already written paper at the last minute, but even that's an anthropomorphism that misrepresents the alien ways in which the tool works.
Hopefully that is the case, because what Google and others are
trying via AI, is to privatize the web. They already tried it
via AMP.
People are probably annoyed that AI/LLMs are lying to them, so
not everyone sees the main threat being Google trying to
containerize and "walled garden" approach access to information.
> I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied.
Well, many people pointed out that AI lies. We can have two reasons for this:
1) deliberate
2) a feature of how AI works
I think it is mostly 1), but 2) could also factor in, because if ALL AI is lying, then probably something is wrong with how AI works right now. Since they prefer to hallucinate. But AI could be made stricter and not hallucinate, so I think 1) is the main issue.
> But AI could be made stricter and not hallucinate
Do you have a source for this? So far every single LLM-like does a lot of hallucinating, often just small things like wording that implies stronger correlations than exist, or wording that implies relationships that don't exist, etc. but sometimes it's also just wrong facts.
I don't think that means anything. It's just some random words to add pretense to an arbitrary change.
I mean, just stop to think about it. You have a Youtube account, you post videos. Analytics shows traffic from Google but can't show you the keywords.
At one point, Google merged Youtube with Google+. Just did it outright without asking anybody.
Youtubers link their Youtube accounts with Google AdSense.
You can link your Youtube account with your Google Ads account if you want to advertise.
One of the latest features added to the Search Console was... an AI chatbot.
So Google showed us they can link anything with Youtube when it wants, and they can add new features to GSC if it's AI, but for some reason showing Google search terms for Youtube channels took 20 years.
I wish I knew a word like enshittification but for when something improves but at a rate so slow you don't even feel like celebrating it anymore. I think I'd use such word a lot...
The term you're looking for might be "maintenance mode". This sounds like what we do with software we don't care to develop further, even if it's the big cash cow
It may just be me, but I find googles search console surprisingly inaccurate or at least hard to parse. Even the data within it is often conflicting and I'm not sure why the results show as they do. Things like it will show a click through rate for specific pages but have no correlation to the search terms that drove that click, yet show impressions for the page far beyond what it shows for terms. Can't imagine it will be better for something as hard to track as creator tracking cross-platform.
I noticed yesterday that they've managed to make editing the text field on their search page lag and flip/reorder characters entered during the edit: editing “foot pedal” into “foot pedal keyboard” became “foot pedal oardkeyb”
I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.
Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.
They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.
If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.
It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.
I recently tried Kagi again after not being particularly impressed 2-3 years ago. Swapped it to default after a week. For me it works better than Google probably 80% of the time now.
Doctorow goes into greater detail on how Google purposely worsened Google search in his book Enshittification. It’s a very thorough chapter and it’s clear what they did.
The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]:
"As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..."
That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more.
I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied. Not always of course, but often enough that I have noticed it.
[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-con...
> "a different insight"
What a generous euphemism. Depending on the topic, it's not unusual to see Google AI search referencing links that indicate the exact opposite of what it presents in its prose.
So many of these tools are presented as if they're doing something you'd intuitively expect of a human operator, like collating search results and then summarizing them in this case, but the actual operation of them is so alien to us that our intuitions don't apply and these presentations are all but fraudulent.
Because it's presentation cites references, and because those references sometimes reinforce the expression of the AI prose, we grant it trust, but it doesn't use those references in the way a human would and so the relevance of them being cited is radically different (and weaker) than we're accustomed to.
The closest example in human behavior might be the rushed, naive student who just pastes citations into an already written paper at the last minute, but even that's an anthropomorphism that misrepresents the alien ways in which the tool works.
Hopefully that is the case, because what Google and others are trying via AI, is to privatize the web. They already tried it via AMP.
People are probably annoyed that AI/LLMs are lying to them, so not everyone sees the main threat being Google trying to containerize and "walled garden" approach access to information.
> I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied.
Well, many people pointed out that AI lies. We can have two reasons for this:
1) deliberate 2) a feature of how AI works
I think it is mostly 1), but 2) could also factor in, because if ALL AI is lying, then probably something is wrong with how AI works right now. Since they prefer to hallucinate. But AI could be made stricter and not hallucinate, so I think 1) is the main issue.
> But AI could be made stricter and not hallucinate
Do you have a source for this? So far every single LLM-like does a lot of hallucinating, often just small things like wording that implies stronger correlations than exist, or wording that implies relationships that don't exist, etc. but sometimes it's also just wrong facts.
I don't think that means anything. It's just some random words to add pretense to an arbitrary change.
I mean, just stop to think about it. You have a Youtube account, you post videos. Analytics shows traffic from Google but can't show you the keywords.
At one point, Google merged Youtube with Google+. Just did it outright without asking anybody.
Youtubers link their Youtube accounts with Google AdSense.
You can link your Youtube account with your Google Ads account if you want to advertise.
One of the latest features added to the Search Console was... an AI chatbot.
So Google showed us they can link anything with Youtube when it wants, and they can add new features to GSC if it's AI, but for some reason showing Google search terms for Youtube channels took 20 years.
I wish I knew a word like enshittification but for when something improves but at a rate so slow you don't even feel like celebrating it anymore. I think I'd use such word a lot...
The term you're looking for might be "maintenance mode". This sounds like what we do with software we don't care to develop further, even if it's the big cash cow
It may just be me, but I find googles search console surprisingly inaccurate or at least hard to parse. Even the data within it is often conflicting and I'm not sure why the results show as they do. Things like it will show a click through rate for specific pages but have no correlation to the search terms that drove that click, yet show impressions for the page far beyond what it shows for terms. Can't imagine it will be better for something as hard to track as creator tracking cross-platform.
This is mostly by design. Google doesn't want it to be possible to deanonymize the data.
Official source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-con...
Reading about anything Google Search in 2026 gives off some Yahoo vibes around 2006.
I noticed yesterday that they've managed to make editing the text field on their search page lag and flip/reorder characters entered during the edit: editing “foot pedal” into “foot pedal keyboard” became “foot pedal oardkeyb”
I've had it happen many times that the characters appear right to left. Using google in steam overlay makes this happen constantly
having coded with several RTEs, this just triggered some PTSD
Also gives off desperation vibes with Google finally doing some innovation on their monopolistic product now that it’s losing market share to AI.
That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break.
Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms
Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.
I don’t think google should be held responsible for “breaking” this. It was crazy that one website got to see what i was doing on a second completely unrelated website.
Yep. There was all kinds of data a user could enter into Google search and unknowingly share with a search result site. Sucks for "SEOs", but great for users.
They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.
If they indeed made search worse “on purpose”, there should be plenty of alternatives with better results. I’ve tried about a dozen of them, including paid ones like Kagi, and found the quality of results to be universally worse than Google’s, especially for niche searches where it matters the most.
Your logic makes no sense. Just because something is worse relative to how it used to be does not mean alternatives are now better than it.
It takes a huge amount of money to compete with Google in search and all Google has to do to destroy that investment is to dial back the sandbagging. They really did have a moat.
I recently tried Kagi again after not being particularly impressed 2-3 years ago. Swapped it to default after a week. For me it works better than Google probably 80% of the time now.
Google also did 100% make search worse on purpose as this great piece discusses: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Doctorow goes into greater detail on how Google purposely worsened Google search in his book Enshittification. It’s a very thorough chapter and it’s clear what they did.
google search ads revenue still growing XX% a year.
Mirror without Paywall: https://archive.is/fcl2T
Weirdly paywall is borken of safari….just a grey full screen modal overlay with nothing to click. But you can just use reading mode anyway.
Does everyone see this? I can’t.
I don't have it yet. Probably getting A/B tested or slowly rolled out like everything else on Google.
what do you mean? See what?
The option that’s talked about on the main post.
Now if Google only were to have a good search engine ...
Please gogol, stop being super evil, restore interop with noscript/basic HTML web engines.
"Creators"?
So, artisans, metalworkers, engineers?
It's for people who make "Content"