{"id":17833,"date":"2026-05-20T16:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T16:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/google-is-about-to-cripple-the-internet-beervanablog-com\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T16:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T16:30:08","slug":"google-is-about-to-cripple-the-internet-beervanablog-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/20\/google-is-about-to-cripple-the-internet-beervanablog-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Is About to Cripple the Internet – beervanablog.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

Don\u2019t take my word for it\u2014Google\u2019s AI summary agrees.
About a month ago, traffic to this site spiked. I hadn\u2019t posted anything, so I wondered was going on. It turned out that Bass\u2019 newfound popularity was a boon to Beervana<\/em>: people had discovered my Making of a Classic post<\/strong><\/a>. When your job is putting information into the world, and \u201cthe world\u201d now means the internet, it\u2019s satisfying to see people find your work.
This site is 20 years old, and while it contains a bunch of ephemera (like this post is destined to become), it also has quite a bit of valuable information. Of the top ten most-visited pages to Beervana in 2026, six are older posts. One of the reasons I don\u2019t do listicles and other clickbait is this very reason: it\u2019s better for the site to have a robust archive. Or it was until now<\/strong><\/a>:
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\u201cThe era of the \u2018ten blue links\u2019 is officially over. At its Google I\/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined \u2018intelligent search box\u2026\u2019
\u201cInstead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch \u201cinformation agents\u201d to gather information on a user\u2019s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.\u201c
This will be very bad for independent media or anyone who makes a living researching, reporting, writing, and posting their knowledge on the internet. It could very well destroy Beervana. <\/em>
This is radical <\/em>stuff. Google plans to use its AI, Gemini, to scrape the internet, steal the information it finds (I hate corporatese, but this is the \u201cintellectual property\u201d of millions of smart people), repackage it as a Google product, and starve the sites it\u2019s plundering of traffic. A young Brit, discovering Bass on cask at a pub for the first time, will still be able to consult their phone for info about the venerable brand, and they\u2019ll still find the information I posted, but they won\u2019t have to visit Beervana<\/em>. Google will just repackage the info, passing it along without attribution. Google, meanwhile, can further monetize the information it steals from me. (No doubt there will<\/em> be some kind of attribution, enough that Google\u2019s lawyers are satisfied this theft is legal\u2014like those little link buttons no one ever clicks that are included in the current AI summaries.) TechCrunch aptly <\/em>summarizes the development:
\u201cCombined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.
\u201cThere\u2019s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.\u201d
It\u2019s rare a company announces a burglary before they commit it, but that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening here. This is from Google\u2019s announcement yesterday:
\u201cWhether you want to wrap your mind around astrophysics or visualize how your watch works, Search can design custom layouts, assembling components (like interactive visuals, tables, graphs or simulations) in real-time. These generative UI capabilities will be available for everyone in Search this summer, free of charge.\u201d
Google doesn\u2019t produce knowledge, and they elide the question of where that information about astrophysics comes from. But it sure ain\u2019t Google. And it sure ain\u2019t free. Someone got a PhD in theoretical physics and spent their career teaching people about it. It lives on a website somewhere, and not freely. But it\u2019s free to steal. <\/em>
Google continues, describing their plans to become information pirates:
\u201cWith information agents, you can stay updated on whatever matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently look across everything on the web, like blogs, news sites and social posts\u2026 So if you\u2019re apartment hunting, you can brain dump all of the exact requirements you\u2019re looking for, and your agent will continuously scan for you, notifying you when listings meet your needs.\u201d
Where did they get the information about those apartments? Don\u2019t you worry about that! Your AI agent doesn\u2019t ask and doesn\u2019t tell.
I spent several weeks imputing information about every brewery taproom into our database at Celebrate Oregon Beer<\/strong><\/a>. This is the kind of information Google will pirate, laundering it through their AI window so you never have to venture into the choppy waters of the internet. Google is stealing from nonprofits, governments, and universities. It is \u2026 bad.
I am genuinely at a loss. I could shift my writing to a newsletter format, which would evade Google\u2019s tentacles (burglars, pirates, sea monsters?\u2014my metaphors are getting out of hand). But that would mean a basically inaccessible archive. At that point, every<\/em> post becomes ephemera.
This site, which I have steadfastly refused to festoon with pop-ups and all the garbage of our enshittified age, has been supported by my incredibly generous sponsors\u2014my publishing partners\u2014Guinness and pFriem. They allow me to write these posts, and they keep the ads and pop-ups off the site\u2014and<\/em> they support the archives, which benefit all those people with questions about Bass, or Austrian m\u00e4rzens, or West Coast pilsner, or myriad other posts living on this site that enrich our knowledge. (In a lovely bit of symmetry, one of those top ten posts is a four-month old article called \u201cWhy is Guinness so Popular?\u201d<\/strong><\/a> Another is my post about pFriem\u2019s collab with Rahr<\/strong><\/a> on the new To Thee pilsner malt.)
So, I don\u2019t know. I guess my plea here is to keep reading this site on this site<\/em>, not through Google\u2019s new pirate channel. I know Google is going to win this one in the end\u2014it\u2019s just too easy to just glance at an answer without clicking through\u2014but you can help slow it down.
That\u2019s all I got.
Beervanablog.com was created by <\/em>The Brew Enthusiast<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

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Don\u2019t take my word for it\u2014Google\u2019s AI summary agrees.About a month ago, traffic to this site spiked. I hadn\u2019t posted anything, so I wondered was going on. It turned out that Bass\u2019 newfound popularity was a boon to Beervana: people had discovered my Making of a Classic post. When your job is putting information into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17834,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}