Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge:

Now, Google is beginning to replace news headlines in its search results with ones that are AI-generated. After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is.

Frequent followers of my work know that I am not a fan of The Verge’s headlines, and that I think the shift toward clickbait is emblematic of a dying web. MacRumors doesn’t need to publish six different articles whenever Apple publishes a new beta. But these organizations do this as a last-ditch effort to encourage people to click on Google search results. People have largely stopped clicking on search results; they read the artificial intelligence summary at the top of the page and move on. These summaries are frequently inaccurate and rarely link to good sources, but most people either don’t know that or don’t care enough to scroll down to the links.

This is dubbed “Google Zero” by Nilay Patel, The Verge’s own editor in chief: the idea that Google will no longer provide meaningful traffic to publishers. I can see this in my own data: aside from the social media platforms, the largest referrers to my site are my site itself (people clicking on posts through the archive) and Kagi, a boutique, paid alternative to Google Search that prioritizes high-quality links. Google search refers very little to my site these days because the AI Overview at the top of the page summarizes its contents and leaves the link in a footnote. (I know this because Google’s robots, along with ChatGPT to a lesser extent, crawl specific pages quite frequently.)

This is a significant existential crisis for Google, which, on one hand, wants people to have a good, quick search experience, while on the other hand, wants publishers to publish high-quality information on the internet. If nobody publishes good information, the AI Overviews quickly become useless. And publishers won’t publish good information if nobody clicks on the search results. This problem quickly becomes cyclical. Google now swears the AI Overviews are actually good for search traffic, but that assertion isn’t rooted in reality. So, it’s trying random “experiments” to find a good balance between user experience and publisher experience.

I assume the rationale for this particular “experiment” — which Google swears is “small” — is to make headlines more interesting for people to click on. Some of the rewrites are more vague than the originals, while others are more direct. I don’t think the point here is to improve user experience as much as it is to help publishers out with clickbait. Either way, this moronic “experiment” never indicates the headline has been rewritten, let alone by AI, and the rewrites are terrible, anyway. They’re not like the ones on Techmeme, which, as far as I know, are written by real technology journalists who have read the articles they’re linking to.

As I said at the beginning, this shift to clickbait is emblematic of a dying web, and writing clickbait with AI to incentivize the creation of good content that will further feed the AI is even more emblematic of the end of the internet as we know it. Humans are now pawns for the AI systems — we are placating humans instead of making those systems more helpful. The tables have turned, and publishing on the internet in 2026 now means fighting with an AI bot for a reader’s attention. And most alarmingly of all, this spells a literacy crisis in the Western world, where people have offloaded their thinking to an AI bot that hallucinates way too frequently.