The blue links are gone: Google has turned search into AI answers
Gemini 3.5 Flash now powers every Google search, answering with ready-made text instead of links. Websites report traffic drops of up to 89 percent – and a paradox threatens the model itself.
The ten blue links that have organised human access to information online since 1998 are no longer the first thing you see when you google something. On July 10, Google completed the most sweeping change to its most important product in the company’s 27-year history: the AI model Gemini 3.5 Flash now powers every search, answering with a ready-made, synthesised text at the top. The links are pushed down below the answer.
The change no longer applies only to an optional "AI Mode", but to every single search – globally, in nearly 200 countries and 98 languages, free for everyone. More than one billion people now use it every month.
What search looks like now
Where you previously got a list of links to choose from, Gemini now reads multiple web pages, writes a combined answer, and shows the sources as small references within the text – much like footnotes in an essay. The search engine also builds custom pages on the fly, pulls in images and structured information, and offers "information agents" that can follow a topic over time and alert the user to updates.
A dramatic fall for websites
For websites that live on traffic from Google, the consequences are serious. So-called zero-click searches – where the user gets the answer without clicking through – now make up around 60 percent of all searches. Clicks to websites have fallen by up to 58 percent, and some news sites report traffic drops of nearly 90 percent on certain queries.
Among those affected are major players: software company HubSpot estimates it has lost 70–80 percent of its search traffic, education service Chegg reports a 49 percent drop, and media house DMG Media has documented falls of up to 89 percent for some queries. A series of antitrust suits against Google are now accumulating – but such cases take years, while the traffic is already gone.
A paradox at the heart of the model
Google’s AI answers are assembled from content on the web. If the traffic collapse weakens the websites that produce that content, it also weakens the basis the AI draws its answers from. Google is, in effect, eating the crop it depends on others continuing to sow. That is precisely why many argue some form of compensation must flow back to the sources – whether through citations that actually generate clicks, licensing deals with large publishers, or revenue sharing.
What does it mean for ordinary users?
For the person searching, the change is in many ways convenient: the answer arrives faster and requires less clicking. But there is a price. When one actor decides both what the answer is and which sources are visible, the diversity of voices online becomes less visible – and it becomes harder to judge where the information actually comes from. The blue links left the choice to you. Now the machine increasingly makes that choice for you.
