The world wide web as we know it has changed. Traditional web search is on the edge of completely transforming from pages of links to AI-curated answers, and entire business models are becoming extinct overnight. But AI Mode is just Google’s latest challenge for publishers. The company has actually been systematically dismantling its internet search product for years. Here’s a timeline of Google’s efforts to kill organic search, and why they did it.
Google Prioritizes Revenue Over Organic Search Quality (2019-2023)
In February 2019, Google’s search team faced a crisis. A leaked internal “code yellow” alert, later cited in the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit, revealed declining revenue from search ads. The response? A series of changes that would fundamentally alter Google’s relationship with the open web.
By mid-2020, Ben Gomes, the celebrated engineer credited with shaping Google Search’s core principles, was replaced by Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Google’s Ads and Commerce team. After years of purposely keeping these groups separate, the wall came down. To put this in perspective for the media industry, it’s the equivalent of making a sales executive your news director.
Raghavan’s tenure marked a shift from engineering-driven search to growth-at-all-costs. His strategy: prioritize ads and paid links over organic search results.
Google also quietly redesigned its ad labels, making paid results nearly indistinguishable from organic ones — a move criticized for blurring the line between ads and real content.
Under pressure from Raghavan, Google rolled back algorithmic updates like