Google AI Devours 18 Pages for Every Click It Bothers to Send Back

Google AI Overviews works like a buffet where the chef eats every plate and hands you back the napkin. The current crawl-to-click ratio runs around eighteen to one, meaning Google chews through eighteen pages of somebody else’s work for every lonely visitor it bothers to send back, while roughly sixty percent of searches now end with zero clicks. At its 2026 conference Google billed the overhaul as the biggest change to search in twenty-five years, a downright cheerful way to announce it is hollowing out the open web that fed it for a quarter century. Your f*ucking AI ate the entire internet and filed it under product improvement. The Next Web on the open-web damage.