The AI Coup: How Google Rewrote the Rules of the Web
SmithDigital
Google is no longer just a search engine. It's now the world’s most powerful answer machine—and it’s rewriting the web as we know it. In this episode, we unpack the seismic shift triggered by Google’s AI Overviews and the silent launch of “AI Mode,” a transformation that turns search from a discovery engine into a walled-garden oracle.
We dive into:
-The Death of Blue Links: What it means when Google stops guiding traffic and starts absorbing it.
-The Broken Social Contract: How the tacit agreement between publishers and platforms has collapsed—and what’s replacing it.
-The New Economics of Visibility: Why being cited in an AI answer won’t pay the bills, and how traffic is evaporating without warning.
-The Mirage of Google Discover: Why your next traffic spike might be your last, and why relying on Discover is a losing game.
-AI Visibility vs. SEO Rankings: A new playbook for surviving—and even thriving—in a machine-interpreted web.
-A Call to Arms: Structured data, human-centric content, creator compensation, and the urgent need for collective resistance.
This is not just a search update. It’s an epistemological shift—a redefinition of how information is surfaced, monetized, and controlled. If you publish content online, this episode is your survival guide to the post-search era.
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