Google: From Symbiote to Parasite

I launched my first website in late 1994. I was fourteen years old at the time and wanted to launch a site for a fantasy wrestling league that my friends and I were operating. I had nothing but a book on HTML, free hosting provided by Prodigy and far too much free time.

The project failed pretty quickly. There are a million reasons for that. The site was objectively terrible, even for the time; the internet was too nascent, and my heart really wasn’t into the project. But one major problem was that no one found it.

Google wouldn’t exist for years, and with long URLs and a small base of internet users, it wasn’t easy to get people to visit the site. It was a lot of work for nearly no reward.

Internet search, initially, felt like a Godsend for webmasters. Early search engines, such as AltaVista, Hotbot, Excite and Ask Jeeves (later Ask.com), provided a critical service. They helped connect internet users with websites. Webmasters, such as myself, flocked to submit our sites for listing.

And it wasn’t just nascent search engines. Link lists, webrings and a myriad of other tools were attempts to get our sites in front of interested visitors.

That was the environment in which Google launched in the late 90s. However, Google had one simple advantage over its competitors: it was better.

With its improved algorithm, an advanced crawler that indexed more pages and a more straightforward interface, Google was better for users and webmasters alike.

Fast forward 25 years, and that is no longer the case. Google has evolved from a symbiotic force that benefited the entire internet into one that is actively destroying the ecosystem it created.

The path between those two points is long and complex.

The Long, Rocky Road Into Hell

To be clear, Google has always had its critics and skeptics. Even in the heady days of the early 2000s, many felt that Google was profiting at the expense of webmasters. One of the earliest and most significant copyright rulings, Perfect 10 v. Google, addressed this question in part.

However, for most people, the Google trade was relatively equitable. We allow Google to crawl our websites and content, then Google directs interested users to our sites. Google earns revenue from selling ads on its search results, but most of the traffic still flows to the original sites.

Proof of this is in the popularity of search engine optimization (SEO). Webmasters, desperate to improve their search rankings, pay money to experts in hopes of drawing more traffic.

However, almost from the very beginning, Google began experimenting with ways to keep more visitors for itself.

Starting in the mid-2000s, Google began experimenting with the shading of ads in search results. By 2013, the background was completely gone, and only a small “AD” label and a thin border separated ads from organic results. In 2019, Google also removed the border.

But it wasn’t just the placement and formatting of ads. In 2012, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph. This is the card to the side of the results that provides basic information about a query. This meant users could get basic answers without ever clicking off Google’s site.

However, things began to explode in the last few years. In 2020, Google expanded the Knowledge Graph, further pushing results down the page. Then came the AI boom. In 2023, Google began putting AI answers in search results.

Now, for many queries, there are no organic third-party results “above the fold” on results pages. Real sites are literally buried under Google’s slop.

However, that’s only half the problem.

AI, Data and Damned Lies

All of this would be bad enough. However, for those who operate independent websites, it’s been a one-two punch.

Beginning in mid-to-late 2023, webmasters began reporting significant drops in their Google traffic. Results that were once filled with quality websites were being filled with low-quality content, much of it AI-generated.

According to some, their website traffic has dropped by as much as 90%. This site has also seen a steep drop in traffic, though not as serious as some.

Unsurprisingly, this occurred shortly after Google removed the “written by people” verbiage from its documentation, thereby opening the floodgates to AI-generated work in search results.

It would be easy to dismiss this as the gripes of sour webmasters. However, there is data to back up these concerns.

Cloudflare, when announcing its recent Pay-Per-Crawl system, noted that, over the past six months, Google’s crawl-to-referral ratio has dropped from 6:1 to 18:1. This is primarily due to a decrease in referrals, as crawling has remained steady.

In short, Google is crawling sites just as frequently as ever, but is sending less traffic to those sites.

To clarify, Google is aware of this issue. In fact, they worry that it will ultimately impact them. An internal document said that traffic loss due to AI was “inevitable,” and their solution was not to improve search, but to monetize their AI system, Gemini.

That leaves independent webmasters in an impossible position. They are forced to compete with countless AI-generated works for the referral scraps Google is willing to part with.

However, the really bad news is that there may not be much anyone can do about it.

Don’t Be (The Most) Evil

Clearly, Google has shifted. It went from a company that enabled the internet and empowered independent (human) creators to find an audience to keeping a bigger and bigger piece of the pie for itself.

Google’s embrace of AI only adds another layer to this. Without human-written content to train on, AI systems would not exist. Not only are authors losing out, but they’re also losing out to AI-generated answers and pages made possible by their work.

The temptation is to lash out and fight back. However, there is a problem with that. For all of Google’s flaws and issues, they are still the best partner among the major players.

Revisiting Cloudflare’s statistics, Google’s crawl-to-referal ratio may have dropped to 18:1, but that’s orders of magnitude better than OpenAI (1,700:1) or Anthropic (73,000:1).

While Cloudflare acknowledges that its data can’t consistently track traffic from native apps, these ratios are still astronomical. Most smaller sites would be lucky ever to see a single visit from one of these chatbots.

Although Google in 2025 is a significantly worse deal for webmasters than it was in 2005, it’s still better than its major competition. Even if your Google traffic has dropped 90% since 2023, you’re still getting far more traffic from it than ChatGPT.

And that’s the frustrating part: there’s no easy way to fight back.

Bottom Line

To put it mildly, blocking Google isn’t practical. As bad a deal as it has become for independent creators, it’s still better than the alternatives. To make matters worse, there’s not much competition in the search market.

Its biggest direct competitor, Bing, is owned by Microsoft and is doing many of the same things, including AI results.

For independent publishers to survive, there needs to be a genuine interest in search and discovery. This includes both public and search engine results. The less the audience feels the need to click through, the bigger the struggle for independent creators.

Personally, I’ve switched to using Kagi as my primary search engine. Though it does offer AI answers, it’s easy to turn off, and the entire focus is on finding good pages to visit. The downside is that unlimited searches start at $10 per month.

But that’s the tradeoff. When you don’t pay for something, you’re the product, not the customer. To me, search is too important not to be a customer.

Still, I know I’ll be in the minority on this. Google is going to remain dominant for the foreseeable future. The question is how much of the internet will it swallow up as it continues to grow?