Google just broke the deal with its own search results
Google just broke the deal with its own search results
There is an implicit deal that has existed between Google and the internet since roughly 1998. You make something good, Google indexes it, people search for it, Google sends them to you. Everyone wins. The web gets built. Google gets to sell ads around it.
This week Google announced it is testing new ad formats in Search and expanding something called Direct Offers. And a separate story broke about what people are calling the Antigravity bait and switch. Together they suggest the deal is being quietly rewritten, and not in your favour.
What the Antigravity thing actually is
The story getting passed around under the name Google Antigravity is about a pattern people have been noticing for a while but now have receipts for. Google promotes a feature, a tool, or a third-party integration heavily. Developers and businesses build around it. Traffic flows. Then Google either acquires the space itself, buries the third parties in rankings, or changes the product in a way that removes the value it originally offered.
The bait is the distribution. The switch is what happens after you have built your business on top of it.
This is not new behaviour. It is the same story as Google Reader, Google Shopping, Google Travel, and a dozen other verticals where Google moved from neutral infrastructure to active competitor. What is new is that people are documenting it more carefully and the pattern is becoming harder to dismiss as coincidence.
The new ad formats
Meanwhile Google posted on its own blog that it is testing new ad formats in Search and expanding its Direct Offers pilot. Direct Offers lets retailers put deals directly into search results, which sounds fine until you think about what it means for organic results.
More ads, placed more aggressively, with a new format designed to keep commercial intent inside Google rather than sending it to the merchant. The blue links that used to be the point of the page are now somewhere below the fold after AI summaries, featured snippets, knowledge panels, shopping carousels, and now Direct Offers.
The page has not changed dramatically in any single update. It has changed dramatically over ten years of small updates, each one individually defensible, collectively representing a profound shift in what Google Search actually is.
What Google Search is now
Here is what a typical commercial search result page looks like in 2026. You type something in. You get an AI Overview at the top that summarises the answer and means you do not need to click anything. Below that you get ads formatted to look like results. Below that you might get a knowledge panel or a shopping carousel. Below that, finally, you get the actual web.
For informational queries the AI Overview often just answers the question. For commercial queries the ads and Direct Offers capture the intent. The websites that created the content that trained the AI Overview and informed the ads get less and less traffic either way.
This is the deal breaking. The original bargain was traffic in exchange for content. The new reality is that Google extracts the value of the content at the search layer and delivers less of it downstream.
The publisher problem
There is a related story on the same day about more than 340 local news outlets restricting the Internet Archive's access to their content. The reason most of them cite is that they do not want their archives scraped without compensation. The underlying anxiety is the same one driving the Google conversation.
Publishers spent years creating content with the understanding that search engines would send readers to them. Now the search engines are using that content to answer questions directly, the AI companies are using it to train models, and the readers increasingly never arrive. The Archive situation is a symptom of a broader feeling that the content economy's foundations have shifted without anyone explicitly agreeing to new terms.
Is there an alternative
Kagi exists and charges a subscription fee and does not run ads. Marginalia exists and deliberately indexes the non-commercial web. DuckDuckGo exists and is fine. None of them have Google's index or Google's reach.
The realistic answer for most people is that Google is still the best search engine for most queries, and that makes the slow erosion of its original deal with the web more uncomfortable rather than less. You keep using it because nothing else works as well. Google knows this.
The part that actually bothers me
I have been building small websites and tools and blogs for years. Nothing big. Nothing that depends on Google traffic to pay rent. But I think about the people who do depend on it, who built businesses and publications and communities around the assumption that Google's job was to send people places.
Those people are not wrong to feel like the rules changed on them. The rules did change. They changed slowly and with excellent PR and individual product decisions that each made sense on their own terms. But the cumulative effect is a web where Google is no longer primarily an index of the internet. It is a destination that happens to have an index attached.
That is a different thing. And it happened without anyone really voting on it.