How Google’s Shift Is Costing You

Money, obviously. But the real cost runs far deeper than your wallet.

Google’s market share has largely held steady throughout the AI revolution. By “held steady,” I mean its stock price has skyrocketed, and its AI capabilities grow more formidable by the day. Yet beneath that glossy surface, I suspect trouble is brewing.

Google’s search product isn’t addictive, despite their best efforts to make it so. Only obsessives like us linger there. Meanwhile, audiences, especially younger ones, have plenty of alternatives. They’re abandoning traditional information retrieval methods, and that’s a serious problem, even for a behemoth like Google.

Older users, those already locked into the system, now make up a larger share of Google’s audience. Younger demographics have flashier, more addictive options, and they’re using them to find what they need. Across every engagement metric, 18-to-24-year-olds have declined faster than users aged 65 and over. Shorter visits, fewer pages per session, and worse bounce rates. And this trend is accelerating among younger cohorts.

Evolution is essential for Google and the broader web. Interestingly, Similarweb data shows only a minor drop in audience share for the 18-to-24 group. The real losses hit the 25-to-34 cohort.

TL;DR: The publishing industry and Google share more common ground than either might admit. Google’s recent changes are a deliberate bid to engage and retain younger audiences, who behave differently. Engagement data on news websites, measured by pages per visit, bounce rate, and time on site, declines with audience age. The same pattern holds for Google. AI Mode is Google’s attempt to create a “sticky” product aimed squarely at younger users.

What’s Changed?

The obvious shift: Google now answers virtually everything directly in its search interface. AI Mode is becoming the default response. Personalization runs rampant. Generating clicks is harder, and traditional KPIs like reach are losing value. Consumer decisions happen before anyone reaches your website. The agentic web looms on the horizon. Discover has become less publisher-friendly and more social and creator-driven. Video and user-generated content, all funneled to YouTube and Reddit, are proliferating in the SERPs.

Just glance at the SERP for nearly any term, especially middle-of-the-funnel comparison queries. What people apparently want isn’t publisher-friendly or legacy-search-friendly. They want video, particularly the youth.

Right now, children spend nearly four hours per day watching video on YouTube and TikTok. Four hours. That same group spends just four minutes on publisher websites. The younger you are, the more time you spend watching, the less you spend reading. So the obvious counter for a company that primarily organizes written content is to saturate the market with video. Conveniently, Google owns the market.

This doesn’t just affect organic search. Adverts are more expensive to run because AI Overviews have decimated click-through rates across the entire search ecosystem. For almost all businesses, customer acquisition costs have risen.

You could argue that Google is using this to pay for AI Overviews, which are far more expensive to generate due to the massive computational power and energy required to run large language models. But I won’t suggest that. It would be incomprehensible for the company that dominates the entire ad and search market to deliberately make advertising more expensive just to fund search experiments. Wait a minute…

Why Now?

I believe this is a direct response to two things: the 2023 Code Red Google issued in response to OpenAI, and younger audiences shifting their information retrieval methods.

The first is obvious. OpenAI forced Google to move faster than they would have liked, hence the absolute trash in AI Overviews early on, and even now. It reeked of a product that skipped rigorous testing.

The second is more nuanced. This data correlates almost perfectly with the Similarweb data I pulled. In isolation, it might not be a problem. Perhaps younger audiences will grow into it. But that argument doesn’t hold. We see it in news and publishing. We’re living through the decline in real time.

Younger audiences have the highest recorded screen time globally, at 7 hours 22 minutes, yet spend less and less time reading. They gravitate toward far more visually engaging, stimulating, and addictive technologies. Based on screen time alone, younger audiences should spend the most time on Google. But they don’t. That must be painfully obvious to the Googlers.

While content consumption is at an all-time high, the way people consume content isn’t conducive to traditional publishing. Just 4 minutes a day on news websites for younger audiences versus 18 minutes for those over 55, a 350% increase. The same principle applies to traditional search.

At the risk of sounding too AI-y, this is a truly seismic shift. Ironically, it’s not entirely driven by AI. It’s driven by a combination of big tech’s insatiable appetite for money, a lack of trust in traditional brands, and the rise of the creator ecosystem. And AI, of course.

As someone in the comments noted, Google is “Unc.” Maybe a bit like news websites. Its ability to attract younger audiences has diminished. I think we can clearly correlate Google’s changes with the reduction in younger audience share for publishers. A generation less inclined to click.

One could argue that the traffic losses so many have suffered come almost exclusively from younger audiences. I certainly believe so. Audiences more likely to adopt new technologies, especially flashy ones.

There Are Clear Parallels Between News and Search

Google has gotten richer, as has the AI bubble. All that money has to come from somewhere. It’s everyone else who struggles. These changes are designed to counter a younger generation’s shift toward people and ultra-engaging platforms that encourage passive or incidental information retrieval.

Since 2015, interest in news has declined more significantly among 18-to-24-year-olds, dropping 43%, than in any other age group. Just 64% of 18-to-24-year-olds consume news daily, compared with 87% of people 55 and over.

Historically, news was sought out. You browsed a news website, or a real paper if you felt fancy, or you searched for it. But the discovery layer changed, and search, the engine that powered the volume-driven publishing model for two decades, is responding. Responding to younger audiences’ shifting consumption habits, just as publishers and websites will have to.

Passive consumption is now the norm for younger audiences. That’s why 44% of 18-to-24-year-olds see social media as their main news source, compared to just 15% of those 55 and over. They expect you to just appear. Algorithmic consumption has reduced the need to actively seek something out. If what you serve isn’t delivered directly to their feed, you don’t exist.

Combine this with diminishing trust in traditional brands, zero-click searches, and the rise of the creator, and you can see why publishers and Google are having to change. There have been alternatives to Google for accessing information, like Instagram, Amazon, and YouTube, for years. This is, or has been, Search Everywhere Optimization. It’s been around for a decade. It’s also why reframing SEO as GEO or some other acronym because of LLMs is so moronic.

Now, the individual has become the competition. The creator economy, soon to be worth $480 billion, has produced a new class of competitor: individuals with direct audience relationships, authentic voices, and none of the structural cost of a legacy newsroom. 51% of 18-to-24-year-olds pay attention to creators and personalities, compared to 39% who pay attention to traditional media and journalists, a 12 percentage point inversion.

This is a problem for Google, too. People used to use its organizational skills for all their needs. Now, search is so heavily navigational that it’s hard to know how much “new” stuff people really use it for, outside of news, at least.

Will This Work?

If it’s anything like news publishers, their primary concern is to continually generate new and engaged audiences with habitual products. AI Mode could absolutely be that product. Discover is their version of a social network. They are, in their own way, engaging products. Although the low-intent nature of Discover makes the advertising rubbish, and Google doesn’t really care about it. Sad, but true.

Like Google, the engagement data for publishers tells a pretty bleak story. If we isolate this to the youngest and oldest audiences, it’s clear what’s happening. Younger audiences are far less engaged with traditional news offerings than older audiences. They use these websites differently. They have more diverse and engaging options, so they use websites like news publishers to fact-check, confirm something isn’t spurious BS, and scan and skim.

The same is true of Google. Less of a discovery journey, more of a fact-checking and navigational search. I’m not suggesting older audiences get stuck with adverts or can’t use a menu. That can’t account for an extra 14 minutes of time spent on news websites. But having watched my mother with a computer, it’s not impossible.

So, What’s the Answer?

Lean into what the new generation likes. Adapt and evolve. The same is true for search, both internally and externally, and for publishers. If you work for Google, it makes complete sense to expand your video presence in the SERP and prioritize “quality” user-generated content. The quality part is lacking, as most of the internet, we’re finding out, is a stinking pile of garbage. But notoriously, the tide is tricky to swim against.

For publishers, it means working with creators, leveraging their audiences and ability to deliver things quickly and differently. Creators can benefit from the trust associated with proper news organizations. Is it that unreasonable to think Google should do the same? Instead of abusing their position, they could start by giving people an idea of the impact of AI Overviews and AI Mode. I’m not a financial guru, but I reckon Google has enough money to build and foster creator and publisher programs that are not one-sided, that bring genuine value to people and the wider information retrieval ecosystem.

In this scenario, everyone benefits. When AI companies refuse to pay for publisher content, everyone loses. LLMs lose because they have less unique, human-created, quality content to train on. Publishers lose because they are forced to suppress their visibility and don’t get any money. Users lose because the end output isn’t as good. Model collapse is on the horizon. AI learning on AI falsehoods. A repetitive cycle of garbage. Joyous.

These companies should invest in the ecosystems that built them, particularly Google. For publishers: build owned channels. Get away from relying on big tech. Create brilliant, unique journalism. Supplement it with habit-forming products, puzzles being the obvious example. Build and sponsor audio and video programs that reach your intended audience. Implement channel-specific strategies. Even the New York Times doesn’t rely solely on subscriptions from written content. Not by a long shot. It isn’t enough.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, I think the recent spate of job losses in the publishing industry is just the beginning. Bauer, the BBC, The Washington Post. It’s not UK- or SEO-specific. 100,000 roles are becoming 70,000 ones. Teams are shrinking. And there are real-world ramifications. We are not in a good moment. Some of this can be attributed to AI. But I think more of it is due to longer-term economic difficulties, audiences switching off from traditional news, and things like the Site Reputation Abuse update destroying much-needed revenue lines overnight.

It is hard to make these businesses profitable. Google doesn’t have that problem. But they’re not immune to changing behaviors and becoming yesterday’s news either.