So, uh, what happens now?
Google Zero is on its way.
Good morning.
Before we go any further, let’s just take a deep breath and remember one important thing: As William Goldman once said, nobody knows anything.
OK, good we got that out of the way. So now we can get to today’s newsletter where I wildly speculate about what’s going to happen very broadly to digital media over the next few years.
This all stems from the news in late May that Google was more aggressively rolling out its AI Mode to users. Because of this, there has been a flurry of coverage about “Google Zero” and how it is rapidly approaching.
“Google Zero” is the term people in the media industry have given to the future where referrals from organic search (aka Google) take an asymptotic fall toward zero. There of course will never be absolutely no traffic from Google search engine results pages (SERPS), but in this scenario it will one day be meaningless.
Because, in this scenario, most of the people who use the internet will be accessing information via Google’s AI Mode or ChatGPT or some other agentic AI discovery portal and no longer through standard search engine results pages as they have for almost three decades now.
The SEO expert Barry Adams put it well in one of the recent LinkedIn posts he’s, uh, posted about Google AI Mode: “The web has gotten so bad that a mechanism allowing users to enjoy the web's output without having to engage with its crap is going to become the default.”
I can’t argue with Adams. I find myself using ChatGPT more and more to access information because it saves me time from searching on Google or sifting through websites that stink.
Now, do I have a variety of concerns, both environmental and ethical, about using ChatGPT? Yes, yes I do. But I am using it.
So, if this is the world that has been wrought? What happens now?
Neil Vogel, the CEO of Dotdash Meredith, discussed a lot of this with Brian Morrissey on a recent episode of The Rebooting Podcast. Dotdash, over the last ten years or so, has built perhaps the best SEO strategy for a major publisher on the internet. But Vogel acknowledges that even for them search traffic isn’t what it once was and they are preparing for the future.
The whole Vogel interview is very much worth listening to. He’s a CEO of a publicly traded company so there’s the standard bluster and hot air, but he’s generally pragmatic and direct. One of the points he makes is that, in the media business, there is always an asset that is depreciating and right now that is what’s happening to websites.
So they are investing in the People app, which is resourced with 70, uh, people. And, as Vogel says, “I'm very confident that the way pages look on the internet is not how our pages are gonna look a year from now.”
What he’s getting at in that last quote is that, as people get used to agentic AI, they are going to expect their content to be more interactive. Right now, I can start a discussion with ChatGPT about Todd Rundgren’s 1981 song “Healing Pt. 1” and ask about the song’s chord structure and if that plays any part in why I find the song to be so poignant. That’s a whole new way of engaging with and accessing information. Is that as good as talking to a human musician, music historian, rock critic, or music theory expert? No, probably not. But its better than trying to sort through Steve Hoffman forums or Reddit to find something about it.
Kyle Chayka, too, has a vision of what happens next. In a very thoughtful piece, Chayka lays out how the game for media professionals has switched from “manipulating social networks to build proof of an audience and then cashing that capital into some lucrative institutional legitimacy, and the now vanishing prospect of a stable media job” to “funneling your disparate followers toward yourself and away from institutions, promoting yourself in opposition to them.”
As he points out, this means that “[t]he new solo journalist is everywhere at once, not just tweeting but turning themselves into ever-present parasocial holograms. They mount an implicit argument that the cult of personality is better, or at least more adapted to the current moment, than following a traditional media outlet.”
To do this, one has to “start a series of direct-broadcast channels for yourself — newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel — and then use your preexisting social-media accounts to promote them. Then, broadcast yourself incessantly, your face, your voice, your thoughts, as if you are a 24/7 cable news channel of one. Go on television, if you can, with your Substack publication in your chyron, otherwise, livestream on YouTube or Instagram or Substack. Importantly, collab with anyone who has more followers than you. Cross-post on their newsletter, appear on their video podcast, or get into a public fight that benefits both parties. Finally, you will have developed your digital clique, the bellicose band of paying subs who sustain your livelihood and pay attention to your sponsorships.”
I’m dumping all of these quotes from Chayka in, because it is painfully true. And it sounds completely exhausting. Reading it all laid out right there, it’s clear that if this is part of the future, it can’t last much longer.
But it represents the opposite pole of what happens when agentic AI takes over as the main point of discovery for the internet. You’re going to need people to guide you. It’s just that, there’s a lot of people out there. And not all of them can be trusted and not all of them deserve your subscription dollars even if they are asking for them and looking for them to sustain a livelihood.
Something has to give. Right now, most legacy brands from the 20th and early 21st century are stuck in the middle and getting squeezed. They won’t all survive. Business Insider just laid off an insane 21% of their staff because Google Zero is on its way.
But the ones that do survive, if they are smart, will figure out how to find a lane between what agentic AI offers and what the world of the independent creator offers. And that will be some mixture of a clear point of view, transparent and authentic engagement with audiences, personality, style, and a strong and trusted content catalog.
I’m not sure what exactly that looks like, but it will be the main way to survive in a world where
AI chat agents will be the primary way people find information on and access the internet
Communities and direct to audience curation and discussion will become increasingly important
Social media will exist as entertainment feeds of video and for marketing your brand through awareness tactics and stunts
YouTube will become the dominant place where people watch video and spend their time
Platforms and apps with built in discoverability engines for creators will succeed
All platforms will face challenges with rising levels of AI “slop”
And print will be seen as a luxury and unique “human-made” product differentiated from AI created content
Again, this isn’t going to happen over night. Google’s AI Mode is only just rolling out to consumers and still isn’t perfect yet. But as we head toward the end of 2026 and the beginning of 2027, Google Zero may be less of a concept and more of a reality.
Good luck out there.
One WaPo quote
“A new initiative aims to…[open] The Post to many published opinion articles from other newspapers across America, writers on Substack and eventually nonprofessional writers, according to four people familiar with the plan. Executives hope that the program, known internally as Ripple, will appeal to readers who want more breadth than The Post’s current opinion section and more quality than social platforms like Reddit and X. The project will host and promote the outside opinion columns on The Post’s website and app but outside its paywall, according to the people, who would speak only anonymously to discuss a confidential project. It will operate outside the paper’s opinion section.
The Post aims to strike some of the initial partnership deals this summer, two of the people said, and the company recently hired an editor to oversee writing for Ripple. A final phase, allowing nonprofessionals to submit columns with help from an A.I. writing coach called Ember, could begin testing this fall. Human editors would review submissions before publication.”
This one is from a Benjamin Mullin report in the New York Times about the Washington Post’s plans to expand its Opinion section. When you read the description, it sounds like the Washington Post wants its Opinion section or Ripple or whatever it will be called to be something like Medium. It seems like they are truly all over the place there. But, honestly, as we’ve covered, who knows what the answer is right now. Finding ways to work with external writers and thinkers who have audiences to try and get them to bring people to your site is as good a try as anything. Substack has kind of taken over as the place to find and discover new writing—but most of that is limited to what is written on Substack. This could, in some way, be something like a replacement for the service that Twitter offered. But I guess that’s looking at it pretty optimistically.
More of those media links
If you want more insight about Business Insider, listen to Dylan Byers and Jon Kelly talk about it on an episode of The Powers That Be podcast from earlier this week.
Yahoo might be a thing again? We’ll have to come back to this. They’re up to a bunch of stuff.
For more Google talk, The People vs. Algorithms guys did a focused look at Google’s history and the history of search.