Last Updated on Jul 23, 2025 by James W
As Alphabet prepares to release its Q2 2025 earnings today, the headlines are predictable: “Google to Continue Growth,” “Ad Revenues Up Again,” “AI Expansion Driving Profits.” Every major financial publication parrots the same line that Google is stronger than ever.
But beneath that polished Wall Street narrative lies the ugly truth: Google is a hollowed-out shell of what it used to be, a decaying empire driven not by innovation but by enshittification, a process of systemic self-destruction in the name of short-term profit. And eventually, it will break.
From Search Engine to Extraction Machine
Google was once the gateway to the internet, an honest broker of information, indexing the world’s knowledge and delivering it with precision. But that era is long gone.
Google is no longer a search engine. It’s a content production company, cannibalizing the very internet it once helped organize. It has systematically:
- Stolen content from small publishers through scraped snippets, featured answers, and now AI Overviews.
- Fed that stolen content into its Large Language Models (LLMs) without consent or compensation.
- Destroyed the livelihoods of independent creators and media sites by crushing their traffic with senseless, AI-driven algorithm updates.
- Flooded search results with SEO parasite sites, Reddit threads, Quora junk, and low-effort spam, all while pushing legitimate creators into oblivion.
Google’s Search team now actively punishes the people who built the web, while propping up an incestuous ecosystem of corporate giants, AI-generated junk, and affiliate-driven clones.
Traffic Collapse Is Not a Bug, It’s a Business Model
Small publishers are watching their traffic collapse not because their content is worse, but because Google intentionally pushed them out. The introduction of AI Overviews, Google’s clunky, factually incorrect chatbot summary at the top of results, is just the latest attack.
Instead of linking out, Google now answers questions directly, keeping users on Google and monetizing attention without ever rewarding the creators behind the answers. It’s theft masquerading as “innovation.”
Google incentivizes bad search: by making search quality worse, people are forced to click around, rephrase queries, and engage more. That inflated “search volume” is faked, not real growth, but artificial demand caused by a degraded experience.
The Numbers Are a Mirage
Yes, Google will probably report increased ad revenue, temporarily. But how much of that is real growth, and how much is a desperate scramble by advertisers to stay visible in a broken ecosystem where organic discovery is nearly dead?
Even their reported “billions of searches per day” are misleading. Users now often have to search 3–4 times just to find one useful answer, if they’re lucky. In other words, Google’s failure is being sold as success.
Meanwhile, users are fleeing to:
- TikTok and Reddit for real answers
- DuckDuckGo and Kagi for cleaner results
- AI tools like Perplexity that at least attempt transparency
Their AI Is a Joke
The most damning part? Google’s AI isn’t even good.
AI Overviews routinely serve:
- Incorrect medical advice
- Fabricated quotes
- Misinterpreted satire
- Dangerous misinformation
- Random Reddit comments masquerading as facts
They’ve spent billions on AI, but delivered a half-baked product that undermines trust in their core service. The irony? They had the best search engine in history and they threw it away.
A Reckoning Is Coming
Google’s model is no longer sustainable. By alienating users, creators, and publishers, they’ve set themselves on a path of long-term decline, no matter how good the Q2 numbers look today.
Just like Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter before them, Google has succumbed to enshittification, the final phase of a platform lifecycle where profit is extracted at all costs, even if it destroys the product itself.
And when the well of scraped content runs dry, when creators stop playing the game, and when users finally get fed up with a search engine that no longer works, the crash will come.
