Who Reads Directly Takes Power Back from the Platforms - Google’s Planned Search Function Barely Leads to Sources Anymore

Google is turning search into an answer machine and pushing aside the list of links that once allowed people to choose for themselves. Anyone who wants to remain loyal to the truth must begin visiting media outlets directly again, because without resistance and without real limits these corporations will continue doing whatever they want.

Last month, at its developer conference in May, Google announced the most sweeping changes to its search engine in more than twenty-five years. Search is set to further downgrade its index of the web, that list of links through which a searcher could previously choose independently. Taking the place of those links more and more is a machine that answers questions directly and points only to the sources it selects for its own overview.

In most tests, the AI generated overview was followed by a dense block of paid results, along with videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Links to news outlets and research papers were left with only a narrow margin. At the same time, Google is pushing readers into an AI mode that removes links altogether. The result is that anyone using the world’s largest search engine receives a summary produced by a program belonging to a corporation closely connected to the White House under Trump. The move builds on earlier changes from 2024 and 2025 and strips users, piece by piece, of the ability to search independently.

The background cannot be ignored. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, along with Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, was among the major technology companies that donated to Trump’s inauguration, and they have yielded to his demands again and again. Last fall, Google subsidiary YouTube agreed to a $24.5 million settlement in litigation over the suspension of Trump’s channel, and the larger share of that money is flowing into the ballroom Trump is building at the White House. Meta reached a settlement in 2025 worth $25 million, of which $22 million was designated for Trump’s presidential library. While the president attacks the press, especially outlets on the left and those critical of him, Facebook and Google suppress journalism on their platforms while simultaneously donating to Trump and settling matters in ways that favor him. Whether out of fear of economic retaliation or shared convictions, perhaps also to boost stock prices, the effect on journalism and democracy is devastating.

How deeply a single intervention can cut became clear in 2018. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided then to show users primarily posts from their friends while sharply reducing posts from news organizations they had deliberately chosen to follow. Countless people who had specifically subscribed in order to see links from independent and investigative outlets suddenly barely saw them anymore. For many of those outlets, most of the traffic coming from Facebook collapsed, and with it total traffic and the support on which investigative journalism depends.

The restructuring of Twitter contributed as well. When Elon Musk took over the platform in 2022, it quickly became a gathering place for far right trolls, disinformation, and machine generated content. Many people left X, and traffic to progressive outlets declined. As a result, these kinds of publications now struggle with shrinking readership and declining revenue, along with understandable mistrust from readers toward the very platforms that once helped them grow. Sudden changes in ranking systems, the downgrading of news, and the expanding use of AI generated summaries shake the economic foundations of journalism. Publishers are meanwhile told they can cut costs by replacing employees with machines.

What emerges is content without journalists, reheated material of inconsistent accuracy. Two months after the Chicago Sun-Times laid off one fifth of its staff, the newspaper published a machine generated list of summer reading recommendations supplied by an outside company, and several of the recommended books did not exist at all. Some outlets have gone so far as to invent fake authors with fabricated names and faces to sign machine written articles. In one case, an artificial intelligence project intended to provide reporting in areas with little local journalism was shut down because it repeatedly copied the local journalists actually doing the work.

The irony is that it is precisely these fabrications and deceptive images produced by such programs that make journalists more necessary than ever. At the height of the war against Iran, machine generated deception caused significant damage in the public information space. And Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, notorious for racist content, introduced further errors when users asked it for help with fact checking. Real human journalists still serve as a barrier against errors introduced by machines. What happens when they are removed from the equation?

Perhaps these very errors explain why people resist getting their news from chatbots and social media. These changes are being imposed on an unwilling public. Less than one percent of Americans prefer chatbots over other news sources, according to the Pew Research Center, and among those who use them, about one third say they find it difficult to tell what is true, while about half believe some of what the chatbot reports is false. They are right to doubt. A study by Forum AI found that responses from leading chatbots to questions about elections were riddled with errors, with more than one third containing factual inaccuracies. These inaccuracies often sounded highly precise and gave falsehood undeserved authority. The programs also regularly relied on commercial websites, including a firearms dealer called Ammo.com, to answer questions about gun regulation.

Reliable outlets have rules for correcting mistakes. But who is a reader supposed to hold accountable when a summary generated by Google is wrong? Combined with the probability of error, this absence of responsibility carries something unsettling. A deeper concern reaches further still. The fragmentation created by chatbots, giving everyone their own customized answer, splinters what remains of our shared reality. Social media already allowed falsehoods to travel farther and faster and locked individuals inside closed chambers of their own opinions, because profit demands holding attention for as long as possible. Now artificial intelligence can isolate us even further. Study after study shows that these programs tell users what they want to hear, flatter them, and reinforce their views. The timing, before a consequential election, at a moment when trust in the media is lower than ever and the future of journalism itself is at stake, could hardly be worse.

If Google’s search changes take hold, a new wave of cost cutting in newsrooms is likely to follow, with mass layoffs and downsizing, more aggressive efforts to extract revenue, mergers and consolidations, and outright closures. Existing outlets will struggle more, and new ones will barely be able to reach an audience capable of sustaining them. Independent outlets that are not financed by corporations will be hit hardest. Truthout, for example, has survived for twenty-five years through its own reporting, daily publication, and the building of a community of small donors. Eighty percent of its annual budget of three million dollars comes from small contributors, eight thousand of whom donate monthly. Google Search is its single largest traffic source. Twenty-seven percent of readers find their way there through search, and those readers stay longer, engage more deeply with the work, and are more likely to donate. If even half of those twenty-seven percent disappeared, the effect would be devastating.

That leaves the question of how to resist, and it concerns not only journalism but also how much of our self determination we are willing to surrender to machines. One must not fall into the mindset that everything has already been decided. Most people, not only in the United States, are concerned about artificial intelligence, and in a divided country this concern unites them. A clear majority sees the social risks as high and fears the technology will disrupt human connection and weaken creativity, and across political lines most oppose the construction of data centers near where they live. That resistance has already begun. Communities are pushing back against corporations such as Blackstone and BlackRock, as well as against xAI, from Arizona to New York to Wisconsin and beyond, and they often win. According to Data Center Watch, local resistance prevented or delayed dozens of data centers in 2025 representing approximately $156 billion in investment.

Instead of turning first to social platforms or search engines, return to visiting news websites directly. Keep a list of reliable outlets and visit them daily, create bookmarks, subscribe to newsletters from trusted publications, and make sure they arrive in your inbox instead of the promotions folder, subscribe to print editions, and make a deliberate habit of simply reading the news. At the same time, sharpen your own judgment, because in a time when giant corporations want to decide what we should believe, that itself becomes an act of resistance.

Perhaps this belongs among the most important questions of the year 2026, greater even than some individual elections because it determines the conditions under which all elections exist. Whoever decides what people see ultimately decides what they know and what they accept as true, and that power today rests in the hands of a handful of corporations nobody elected. Power over attention becomes power over the shared world, and it grows in direct proportion to the convenience with which we hand over our choices. Pushing back against the power of platforms is therefore not only a task for publishers and technologists but a responsibility of citizens, and it begins with the smallest decision, where someone chooses to seek out the source directly instead of letting a machine serve it to them. It is about sovereignty over one’s own attention, and whoever gives that up gives up more than a few clicks.

At the end stands a simple and uncomfortable truth. Without resistance and without real limits, these corporations will continue doing whatever they want, and everyone should understand that. Convenience is the stab in the back of truth, because along the convenient path disinformation and curated answers seep deeper into everyday life day after day. An answer with no human standing behind it cannot be questioned, and a truth abandoned out of laziness is just as lost as one that is forbidden. The difference lies in one small decision, whether we allow an answer to be handed to us or choose our own source. It begins with typing the address yourself. Resist inevitability, resist inertia.