Cory Doctorow has turned Google’s AI search summaries into a charge sheet against Google itself: Gemini looks better than search, he argues, because Google made conventional search and the web it points to worse.
Writing at Pluralistic, Doctorow says people increasingly tell him they rely on Google’s AI-generated answers and skip the links underneath, even while knowing those summaries can contain errors. His criticism is not that the summaries are useless. It is that their convenience depends on extracting answers from websites while cutting those sites out of the traffic and revenue loop that made them worth publishing.
Doctorow frames the old search bargain plainly. Google sent users to pages; publishers received visits that could turn into ad impressions, subscriptions or affiliate fees; Google earned trust by routing people away from Google quickly. AI summaries change that mechanism. Google harvests material from pages, displays an answer at the top of results and gives users less reason to click through, Doctorow argues.
That matters because, in Doctorow’s account, the open web Gemini now summarizes is already in bad shape partly because of Google’s own business decisions. He says Google’s dominance in search, which he puts at about 90% market share, let the company shift from being a conduit to becoming a “sticky” destination designed to keep users inside Google-controlled surfaces.
The mechanism: ads, ranking and fewer exits
Doctorow links the degradation of web pages to the economics of display advertising. He says Google and Facebook, now Meta, monopolized much of that market and refers to the Jedi Blue arrangement as an illegal collusive deal that raised prices for advertisers while reducing what publishers received. He also says Google and Meta take 51% of display advertising revenue, far above the historical cut taken by advertising intermediaries.
His argument is that lower publisher revenue pushed sites to add more ads, pop-ups and other interruptions. That worsened reader experience, which pushed publishers to load pages with still more advertising to compensate for lost traffic. Ad blockers created a brake on that cycle, but Doctorow says Google has spent years trying to weaken blocking and is close to doing so in Chrome, the browser he says reinforces Google’s search power.
He also blames Google’s search ranking choices. Doctorow says Google has favored low-value pages over more carefully researched sites, particularly in product reviews, where he points to “site reputation abuse” pages from once-reliable outlets such as Forbes. He argues AI search can amplify that failure by drawing from spammy pages and turning their claims into confident recommendations.
Kagi as the uncomfortable comparison
Doctorow uses Kagi, a paid search engine, as evidence that Google’s index is not the limiting factor. According to him, Kagi charges $10 a month, rents access to Google’s index and applies its own ranking system. He says its results are much better than Google’s, which he treats as proof that Google could produce better results if it chose different incentives.
The broader claim is not subtle: Google is presenting Gemini as a fix for a miserable search experience that Doctorow says Google helped create. Publishers lose clicks, users get smoother answers with known error risks, and Google captures more of the value from both the index and the answer box.
Google’s founding mission, Doctorow notes, was to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful. His accusation is that the company still organizes the information, but increasingly keeps the usefulness for itself.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.
