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Google I/O 2026 And Its Consequences
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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2026’s Google I/O (Google’s annual developer conference) has been a disaster for the web. The conference-driven development’s forcing through of the Prompt API, a set of Modern Web Guidance skills for AI systems to use that are already showing major accessibility shortcomings, and a whole ton more AI-spangled sloppery, is rushed and unwelcome.
I think the most damaging announcement is the changes coming to Google Search. Rather than a list of relevant links, a search on Google will be more aggressively prioritising the LLM-generated summary, now complete with vibecoded tables, graphs, and interactive elements.
There has until now been a social contract. Website owners let Google scrape their sites and present them in Google Search, and, in exchange, Google Search sends traffic back to those sites. Google wins via adverts on the search page, and sites win due to however they monetise traffic. More largely, everyone wins because there is a financial incentive to create and produce new content.
However, Google killing their side of the contract ends this. If Google only takes and never gives, then sites cannot profit. What is the incentive to publish if the only outcome is feeding Google’s AI with no return? What sources will LLMs have to pull from if all the sources are defunct? How far will Google go folding adverts into their AI output?
I can see the huge short-term gain for Google, but I see no long-term path – not even an unsustainable one. This feels like the end, but of exactly what I’m uncertain.
All of my peers (bar the ones that work at Google) are shattered in a way I’ve never seen before. I don’t know where we go from here.
Stop using it as a start. Stop accepting free with ads as a way to use things you really care about. This model is a guaranteed poisonous route to enshitification. The ads are going to become more nefarious and harder to block / ignore than ever before. Search is important for many of us - pay for it if you can to opt out of ads and personal data collection or support open source efforts.
A lot of people can't afford to pay for every website and webapp they use. Not everyone is in a first-world country with a lot of discretionary income.
WhatsApp (pre Meta acquisition) used to charge $1/year and even that was a barrier for a significant number of users, particularly in developing countries.
The only free models that work are either to use ads, to have a freemium service (where the paid users subsidize the free users), or to have someone else cover the cost for you (which is how it works on most Lemmy servers for example).
Yeah like most people probably don't remember the web before Google, but there was altavista. You know what happened to altavista? It became overrun by SEO bullshit and people stopped using them literally overnight because Google did a better job. If Google starts doing a shit job, you know what's going to happen? People will stop using them literally overnight as soon as anyone else starts doing a better job.
Yes, web search is a "hard" problem, but a lot of it is a hard problem because there's an insane amount of corporate SEO slop out there, and now there's a lot of AI slop out there too. The first person to solve this problem is going to completely destroy Google. Is it an unsolvable problem? I don't think so.
At its core it's a federation problem. Websites want to be discovered. People want to discover websites. But bad people also want to abuse the discovery process to show their own spam that people don't want to discover. The magic that Google brought to the table was PageRank, which allowed them to determine the authenticity of the spam by the number of backlinks that went from other real sites TO that site. This is essentially just "voting", same as we do here. Of course immediately people tried to abuse it by generating their own massive backlink farms but those are pretty obvious and easy to taint as bad actors and scrub out their rankings or remove them completely. If it's not clear yet how similar this is to the exact sort of trustworthiness problems the fediverse is also dealing with with, just wait. People will find ways to solve this.
The arms race against shitty content will never stop -- but the point is, if Google is no longer participating in the war against shitty content and is now switching sides to become a producer of shitty content, they're not going to succeed. People don't want that shit, and people will instantly vote with their feet the moment any very inevitable alternative appears.