By Futurist Thomas Frey
Search is dying. Not dramatically—gradually, messily, in ways that make finding information simultaneously easier and harder than it was five years ago.
Traditional search doesn’t work like it used to. Google’s AI Overview appears on top of search results with AI-generated summaries that have been found guilty of bias, hallucinated facts, and misquoted sources. The blue links you click are increasingly buried beneath AI-generated answers that may or may not be accurate. Google’s AI Overviews reduced organic click-through rates by an estimated 20-40%, meaning the websites that used to get traffic from search are starving while Google feeds you AI-summarized information without sending you anywhere.
AI search works better for some things—ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question and you get direct answers instead of links. But it’s early, unreliable, and breaking the internet’s economic model in ways we haven’t figured out how to fix.
By 2040, search as we knew it will be unrecognizable. But the transition between now and then will be chaotic, economically destructive, and fundamentally change how information flows online.
Continue reading… “Search Is Broken: The Chaotic Transition from Links to AI Answers by 2040”