Google Is About to Cripple the Internet
Don’t take my word for it—Google’s AI summary agrees.
About a month ago, traffic to this site spiked. I hadn’t posted anything, so I wondered was going on. It turned out that Bass’ newfound popularity was a boon to Beervana: people had discovered my Making of a Classic post. When your job is putting information into the world, and “the world” now means the internet, it’s satisfying to see people find your work.
This site is 20 years old, and while it contains a bunch of ephemera (like this post is destined to become), it also has quite a bit of valuable information. Of the top ten most-visited pages to Beervana in 2026, six are older posts. One of the reasons I don’t do listicles and other clickbait is this very reason: it’s better for the site to have a robust archive. Or it was until now:
“The era of the ‘ten blue links’ is officially over. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined ‘intelligent search box…’
“Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.“
This will be very bad for independent media or anyone who makes a living researching, reporting, writing, and posting their knowledge on the internet. It could very well destroy Beervana.
This is radical stuff. Google plans to use its AI, Gemini, to scrape the internet, steal the information it finds (I hate corporatese, but this is the “intellectual property” of millions of smart people), repackage it as a Google product, and starve the sites it’s plundering of traffic. A young Brit, discovering Bass on cask at a pub for the first time, will still be able to consult their phone for info about the venerable brand, and they’ll still find the information I posted, but they won’t have to visit Beervana. Google will just repackage the info, passing it along without attribution. Google, meanwhile, can further monetize the information it steals from me. (No doubt there will be some kind of attribution, enough that Google’s lawyers are satisfied this theft is legal—like those little link buttons no one ever clicks that are included in the current AI summaries.) TechCrunch aptly summarizes the development:
“Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.
“There’s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.”
Burglarizing in Broad Daylight
It’s rare a company announces a burglary before they commit it, but that’s exactly what’s happening here. This is from Google’s announcement yesterday:
“Whether you want to wrap your mind around astrophysics or visualize how your watch works, Search can design custom layouts, assembling components (like interactive visuals, tables, graphs or simulations) in real-time. These generative UI capabilities will be available for everyone in Search this summer, free of charge.”
Google doesn’t produce knowledge, and they elide the question of where that information about astrophysics comes from. But it sure ain’t Google. And it sure ain’t free. Someone got a PhD in theoretical physics and spent their career teaching people about it. It lives on a website somewhere, and not freely. But it’s free to steal.
Google continues, describing their plans to become information pirates:
“With information agents, you can stay updated on whatever matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently look across everything on the web, like blogs, news sites and social posts… So if you’re apartment hunting, you can brain dump all of the exact requirements you’re looking for, and your agent will continuously scan for you, notifying you when listings meet your needs.”
Where did they get the information about those apartments? Don’t you worry about that! Your AI agent doesn’t ask and doesn’t tell.
I spent several weeks imputing information about every brewery taproom into our database at Celebrate Oregon Beer. This is the kind of information Google will pirate, laundering it through their AI window so you never have to venture into the choppy waters of the internet. Google is stealing from nonprofits, governments, and universities. It is … bad.
I am genuinely at a loss. I could shift my writing to a newsletter format, which would evade Google’s tentacles (burglars, pirates, sea monsters?—my metaphors are getting out of hand). But that would mean a basically inaccessible archive. At that point, every post becomes ephemera.
This site, which I have steadfastly refused to festoon with pop-ups and all the garbage of our enshittified age, has been supported by my incredibly generous sponsors—my publishing partners—Guinness and pFriem. They allow me to write these posts, and they keep the ads and pop-ups off the site—and they support the archives, which benefit all those people with questions about Bass, or Austrian märzens, or West Coast pilsner, or myriad other posts living on this site that enrich our knowledge. (In a lovely bit of symmetry, one of those top ten posts is a four-month old article called “Why is Guinness so Popular?” Another is my post about pFriem’s collab with Rahr on the new To Thee pilsner malt.)
So, I don’t know. I guess my plea here is to keep reading this site on this site, not through Google’s new pirate channel. I know Google is going to win this one in the end—it’s just too easy to just glance at an answer without clicking through—but you can help slow it down.
That’s all I got.