Major search engines are now including “AI Summaries” in their search results. While this is sometimes useful, such summaries are extremely annoying. I want to search for websites, not machine-generated summaries. If I wanted machine-generated summaries, I would use a different tool.

Almost paradoxically, this shift in design is going to hurt search engines in the long term. When I don’t click on a search result, because I read the answer from an AI summary, I don’t access the websites. When websites don’t get clicks, like this blog, they die. The smallest websites will die first.

Once most information is captured by a few major websites or platforms, I will just go directly to those places rather than trying to find information via a search engine. To some extent I already do.