Google turns search into AI answers: what this means for the content market

Friends, I’d like to share an observation from the world of AI and search.

Google is rapidly reshaping the search experience: AI Overviews grew from 15% to 43% of queries in a year. At the same time, AI Mode increased from 126 million visits in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026.

Here is what this means in practice:
• search is becoming more conversational;
• users are staying longer within Google;
• publishers are losing referral traffic because of AI answers with no clicks.

Cloudflare is already offering tools to block AI crawlers unless content access is paid for.

Why it matters: the content and SEO market is shifting from links to answers, changing the rules of traffic distribution.

Do you see this as a new search standard or a temporary phase?

#AI #Google #SEO #HackerNews