Google’s AI is killing the web. Now the web is fighting back

Google became the king of internet search and created a free cornucopia of knowledge by striking a clever bargain with anyone who made a website: Let the company’s crawler index your pages and Google would send human readers back. That trade looks very different today thanks to Google’s strategy of using its search infrastructure to strengthen its artificial-intelligence products.

The technique, which has largely flown under the radar, gives the company an unfair advantage over other AI firms while also accelerating the rise of automated traffic on the internet at the expense of humans.