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Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
(www.404media.co)
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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I haven’t used Google as a primary search engine in a decade or more. Nothing I do depends on Gemini (I don’t even use Apple Intelligence that’s a Gemini white label).
Personally, I think what Gemini is destroying is a market-based financial model that many came to associate with the Internet, information access and lifestyle.
Most of the websites I visit pre-date Google and some have gone as far as blocking all bots via robots.txt. They survive not via predatory ad networks but by donations and volunteers.
It’s why I like Lemmy; it follows the same model.
So, I disabled everything AI the I can think of, use DDG as a search engine, ad block wherever, blah blah blah, my search results SUCK. Is there a better way to fix it?
And I use Linux at home...no blows crap
Kagi is pretty decent but the sad truth is that something like duck.ai works better as a search engine than normal search engines
I don't think today's bots take any notice of robots.txt. It's a relic from a more civilized time.
I run a few personal sites with some being available to the wider internet, and I have found that they generally do respect it. All the bots which advertise themselves as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google do obey. However, I do occasionally see a stealth bot appear which uses a normal browser's user agent and those just do whatever they want.
Meta absolutely does not respect robots.txt. they are scraping what I have at around 200 hits / minute.
I also notice there is some data center somewhere (or multiple) proxying all its requests through residential proxies so I can't tell who is scraping. They don't scrape like Meta though. Far slower.
I have no organic traffic so its really obvious that Im watching AI scrappers. I run a tarpit that generates random links that all resolve to the same place so its super obvious its all not human. Its also super obvious when two distinct IPs follow the same word salad link milliseconds apart.
They don’t—but they DO use search index data to figure out where to crawl.
Nah, Gemini is really bad.
There's a push to use AI where I work and we have our own Gemini, openAI, and Grok models and they literally check to make people are at least "trying" to use it...
Gemini will spin "thinking" for maybe 30 seconds, then something like "checking google results" and then just spitting out the same "ai overview" you'd get from searching the same thing.
All Gemini can do is Google something and summarize the first few results, but at that point a human could just pick a trustworthy site themselves instead of going with what has the best search optimization all mashed up.
With that one (and likely a lot of others) the big search engines becoming shit from AI slop and search optimization is going to also make AI even shittier, then the top links the next AI will be shittier.
We'll get AI rewrites of AI rewrites, repeating itself exponentially faster as more money is sunk into it and hallucinations just keep repeating.
Like, this is the natural results of monopolies. Corporations get so large they can't help but ruin the parts that work by integrating parts no one wants to try and make them profitable.
Because one corporation can't function and be as large as Google. It's just too much to keep organized while constantly growing profits. It's like how the square cube law limits the size of buildings and animals.
The larger an animal gets, the weaker it gets pound for pound, until it would reach a point where it isn't even strong enough to breathe...
That's where these giant tech companies are headed.
This is exactly the kind of circular cascade failure that we are going to see. Once the AI engines all start training on their own data and sourcing each others slop it just gets worse and worse.
If it wasn't already an issue, AI companies wouldn't be destroying old books to guarantee they weren't training on AI slop...
The problem is if AI replaces writers, there will never be anything new to train AI on.
Humans haven't hit a wall on innovation, were just no longer in the massive boom from early internet.
Historically the only way to cause those booms is to connect humans together to facilitate the exchange of ideas and collaboration.
We're headed so fast to the opposite I don't know if tech bros are too overconfident to understand they were a product of their time and not the other way around, or if they're smart and selfish enough that they're intentionally trying to freeze human innovation so that there won't be another boom so no other group could clean up and replace them.
robots.txt has been summarily ignored for nearly 20 years, my friend. Sorry to bear the news.