Reddit (and everyone else) faces a bleak internet without Google traffic

Google zero, eventually, comes for us all .

That's the belief, and fear, that meaningful traffic from Google trends toward zero because of changes to its search engine practices and, more recently, its shift toward AI — answering people's search questions not with links to places like websites, but with AI summaries and chatbot dialogue.

Reddit's ( RDDT ) latest earnings report was a reckoning of Google's AI-led changes . And it underscored how Silicon Valley's full embrace of AI may come at the cost of huge swaths of the web — and the companies that rely on Google traffic to operate.

"People still want Reddit. It is just Google is not sending them to Reddit the way they used to," Steve Huffman, Reddit's co-founder and CEO, said on an earnings call earlier this week.

The company reported that search referral traffic was down meaningfully in the past quarter. Google's shift to AI mode and AI overviews has halted traffic that once flowed to the social forum.

"Google is crawling us as hard as ever, so the demand hasn't changed from their point of view either," Huffman said. "The reality is the AI Mode does not drive traffic. Not for us, and not to anybody as far as I know."

The shift toward a more AI-inflicted internet isn't just hurting Reddit. It's hurting Google too , at least in the short term. Its parent company, Alphabet ( GOOG , GOOGL ), shed almost $500 billion (or about two Netflixes) in market value after reporting a slowdown in its core search advertising business, in part due to the lower profitability of AI ads.

A critical view of the whole situation is that Google is smothering online publishers and sabotaging its own legacy business in its rush toward AI dominance.

But Reddit took a stance on the call that could be described as corporate Zen: "For AI Overviews and traffic, look, we don't control Google. We only control Reddit."

The company said it's not counting on that once-sweet Google traffic returning and plans to require all users to create Reddit accounts and sign in to access the site.

Other online publishers are looking to subscriptions to create direct relationships with audiences and are partnering with AI companies to ride the next wave of LLM-based media and product distribution.

Google, for its part, continues to argue the case (although not persuasively, given the stock plunge) that its AI efforts will prevail, even if it's still trying to figure out the problem of how to make more money with it.

Google executives no doubt disagree with the market sell-off, which has dragged the company's price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio back to levels not seen since 2012. Management knew this transition was coming. Their contention is that the success of AI tools will generate a new and different business model, and that it will be more profitable than the search-and-click paradigm the rest of the web relied on.

The bull case is that Google has good reasons to choose this bumpy path. But that also happens to be a bear case for almost everyone else.