This article was originally published by Truthout on June 09, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Google made an announcement last month that could turn the journalism world upside down, accelerating the internet’s shift toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven landscape and serving the Trump agenda of media suppression.

At its developer conference in May, the company announced the most disruptive changes to Google Search in over 25 years. Google Search will further demote its index of the web — a list of links that information-seekers can explore as they choose. Instead of prominently displaying links, it will increasingly become a destination that answers questions directly through AI, linking only to the sources it decides to reference in its overview. On the majority of our tests, the AI overview was followed by a heavy block of sponsored results and a combination of videos, short clips, trending posts, and discussions. Index links — for example, to articles on news sites and research studies — were given only a small fraction of real estate. Additionally, Google is aggressively pushing readers to use AI Mode, which completely removes the index links.

In practical terms, this means users of the world’s largest search engine will see, in response to their queries, a summary generated by an AI bot developed by a corporate behemoth with close ties to the Trump White House.

This seismic move builds upon the launches of AI Overview in 2024 and AI Mode in 2025, shifting toward nearly eliminating the user’s ability to search autonomously, and toward an overwhelmingly AI-driven experience of the internet (and therefore, for many people, of life).

We must take into account the political context in which this shift transpires. Alphabet (Google’s parent company), along with Facebook’s parent company (Meta), as well as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, were among major tech companies that donated to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. They have also consistently capitulated to Trump’s recent manipulations.

Last fall, Alphabet’s subsidiary YouTube agreed to a $24.5 million settlement in a lawsuit stemming from the platform’s suspension of Trump’s YouTube channel. The majority of the settlement will go toward Trump’s now-infamous White House ballroom. Meta, similarly, agreed to a $25 million settlement in 2025. $22 million of that sum was designated to go to Trump’s presidential library.

Meta, like Google, has long been making moves that have severely destabilized the news industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided in 2018 that the platform would prioritize showing Facebook users posts made by their friends and dramatically reduce their ability to see posts made by news organizations that they had chosen to follow. In other words, due to a single algorithm change, the more than 758,000 people who had at the time eagerly signed up to receive links to all of Truthout’s articles in their Facebook feeds suddenly stopped seeing the majority of our posts. This caused a major drop in traffic across the board to news sites, many of which had been persistently encouraged by Facebook to grow their brands on the platform. At Truthout, over 90 percent of our traffic from Facebook disappeared, which decreased our overall traffic by 40 percent and, consequently, the donations we rely on to survive.

Chaotic changes at Twitter also played a role in destabilizing the journalism ecosystem. In 2022, when Elon Musk finalized his takeover of that platform, the move quickly turned the social media site into a cesspool of far right trolls, disinformation, and bot-generated content. This toxicity and disinformation spiral forced many people on the left to leave X, which decreased traffic to progressive websites from the platform.

Over the course of these changes, news organizations like ours have struggled to respond to corresponding significant declines in readership and revenue, along with our readers’ understandable loss of trust in the social media platforms and search engines that initially allowed us to grow. Sudden algorithmic changes, news deprioritization, and increased implementation of AI summaries are shaking the economic foundation of journalism itself. Meanwhile, publishers are being sold the idea that they can cut costs by replacing staff with AI.

The connections to the Trump agenda aren’t hard to see. Trump has been an outspoken critic of news organizations, particularly those that are left-leaning and critical of his administration. Facebook and Google are suppressing journalism on their platforms and weakening news organizations’ ability to hold Trump to account, while also donating to Trump and settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits in his favor.

Whether Facebook and Google are capitulating to Trump due to fear of economic retribution, shared politics, or a desire to increase their stock prices or keep up with technology, the impact is devastating for journalism and democracy.

AI is eroding journalism — and obscuring truth

We’ve already seen some corporate publishers try to jump on the AI bandwagon, arguing that AI will come for our costly but necessary industry one way or another. They frame AI as a way to solve journalism’s most intractable problem: the cost of reporting. But in reality, they’re proposing a vision of journalism resembling content without the journalists — just regurgitated slop of varying accuracy.

Take one high-profile example from last year: Just two months after the Chicago Sun-Times laid off 20 percent of its staff, the paper issued an AI-generated summer reading list sourced from a third-party company. One key problem: Several of the books on the list didn’t actually exist. Some outlets are going so far as to create AI-generated “writers,” complete with fake names and photos, to author their AI-generated articles. And in one notable case, an AI news initiative meant to provide more information in areas with limited access to local news was scrapped after it repeatedly plagiarized the local journalists actually doing that work.

The irony is that the misinformation and deepfakes created by AI make the need for journalists more urgent than ever. For example, during the height of the war on Iran, we watched AI-generated fakery wreak havoc on the sphere of public information. And it should come as no surprise that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot most known for spewing racist hate and distributing child sexual abuse material, further spread inaccuracies when users called upon it for help with fact checking. Right now, those of us who are real human journalists are still able to act as a bulwark against AI-introduced errors. What happens when we’re taken out of the mix?

These inaccuracies are perhaps one of the reasons why people are reluctant to get their news from AI chatbots in the first place. Make no mistake — these changes are being forced upon an unwilling public. Fewer than 1 percent of Americans say they prefer getting their news from chatbots, compared to other news sources, a recent Pew Research survey found. For people who do use chatbots for news, roughly a third of them say they have a hard time determining what’s actually true, and about half say they see news from chatbots that they think is inaccurate.

They are right to be skeptical. A recent study from the AI research company Forum AI foundthat the answers that top AI chatbots provided on questions about elections were riddled with errors; more than one-third of responses included fact errors of some type. Oftentimes those errors sounded incredibly precise, the research found, giving an undeserved air of confidence to factual inaccuracies. Those chatbots also regularly pulled from commercial sources in their summaries — even using websites like firearm retailer Ammo.com to answer questions about gun control, the researchers discovered.

Trusted news outlets have policies for issuing corrections and clarifications. Publications like ours maintain policies and avenues for offering such corrections and feedback. Who can a reader hold accountable if a Google AI summary is incorrect? Matched with the likelihood of factual errors, the lack of accountability has terrifying implications.

On a deeper level, the hyperindividualization of chatbots also poses some bleak questions about the escalating fragmentation of our shared sense of reality. For years, we’ve heard media critics sound the alarm about how social media has helped false information travel far further at much quicker speeds. Additionally, Big Tech companies, understanding that their bottom line requires eyeballs to stay on their platforms as long as possible, designed the algorithms that feed us information to be as addictive as possible by sticking us in echo chambers.

Now AI could atomize us all even further. Study after study has shown that AI chatbots are sycophantic, offering users excessive praise and telling them what they want to hear. And the timing — ahead of a high-stakes election, at a moment when trust in media is at new lows, and in a period where the future of journalism itself is at risk — could not be worse.

An existential threat to journalism

As the Google Search changes take their toll, we will very likely see a new round of cost-saving measures at longstanding newsrooms. These steps will likely include massive layoffs and downsizing, more aggressively invasive revenue generation tactics, mergers, consolidation and closures. It will be harder for existing news sites to continue publishing and nearly impossible for new newsrooms to reach a large enough audience to become financially viable.

Organizations like Truthout — ones that depend on community-building and audience growth to sustain their work — will be among the most impacted.

For 25 years, Truthout has survived by publishing impactful investigative journalism and analysis; distributing full editions 365 days a year; and building a community of readers who support us with small, hard-earned donations.

Eighty percent of our $3 million yearly budget comes from small donors alone. Of those, 8,000 readers support us with monthly donations. Back in 2018, when Facebook decided to suppress the circulation of posts made by organizations, thereby cutting readers off from seeing many articles shared by the news organizations they had intentionally decided to follow, Truthout’s total traffic declined by 40 percent, as nearly all of our traffic from that platform disappeared.

The consequences of the impending changes to Google’s search engine promise to be even more explosive. Google Search is our single largest source of traffic; it’s the route by which 27 percent of our readers find us. And visitors who find us via Google Search are more likely to stay for longer, engage with our work, and donate than those who find us through social media.

If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.

Truthout is just one example; journalism organizations across the field will be devastatingly affected by Google’s new move, just as they were impacted by Meta’s abrupt algorithmic shift. The entire journalism ecosystem will shoulder this blow, particularly independent publishers and news sites that depend on traffic and aren’t bankrolled by large corporations.

How do we resist?

The sudden shift in Google Search presents us with a pointed question, not only about journalism, but about the future of humanity: How much of our autonomy will we cede to AI? To what extent will we adopt an “oh well!” mentality? Or will we seek creative ways to resist, even when it may feel impossible to confront the largest corporations on the planet?

We cannot allow ourselves to become mired in the trap of inevitability-based thinking.

When grappling with questions around the future of AI, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of how the people — yes, actual humans — are relating to all this. The truth is, most people in the United States are concerned about AI. In fact, in a deeply divided country, AI is something of a uniting cause. Asignificant majority of Americans rate the “societal risks” of AI as high, with majorities worried that AI will disrupt human connection and inhibit creativity. People in this country are overwhelmingly more worried than excited about how AI has become enmeshed in everyday life. Meanwhile,across political lines, most people in the U.S.oppose the building of data centers in their communities. This is a mobilizable base.

Why should an entirely AI-driven future be inevitable, when most people don’t really want one? Instead of assuming the die is cast, let’s imagine a world in which the onslaught of AI threats is fuel for a broad-based movement.

This movement isn’t just aspirational: It’s already begun. Some of the most hopeful organizing in recent years can be seen in local fights against data centers. Communities are pushing back against corporate giants like Blackstone, BlackRock, and xAI. And fromArizona to New York toWisconsin and beyond, they’re often winning. According to Data Center Watch, in 2025, local opposition effortsprevented or stalled dozens of data centers, totaling around $156 billion in investment funds.

Meanwhile, we can all respond to Google’s shift toward AI with concrete steps to support independent media and reject the “inevitability” assumption.

Instead of jumping to social media or a search engine for our news, let’s return to visiting news websites directly. Each of us can maintain a list of trusted publications to visit each day. Bookmark your favorites, and return to them. Sign up for email newsletters from your trusted publications, and create filters so that those newsletters arrive in your primary inbox instead of in spam or “promotions.” Subscribe to print publications. Commit to simply reading the news.

Double down on media literacy, practicing discernment and critical thinking as you read and watch the news. In a time when mammoth corporations are attempting to literally tell us what to believe, these commitments are acts of rebellion.

Additionally, since Google Search’s overwhelming prioritization of AI will severely impact revenue for many publications, it’s time to support independent journalism with your money as well as your readership. If you can afford to give, do so, at any level. Without material support from readers and viewers, many independent journalism organizations will fall by the wayside amid the AI onslaught.

For foundations and major donors, there’s a clear mandate here: It’s time to fund our journalism organizations while we experiment and determine new ways of expanding our audiences and driving traffic. We need room to try things — to test out strategies to map an online world beyond Google.

Funding these experiments doesn’t just help one organization or even one sector: As journalism organizations figure out new methods to reach readers, we can share those strategies with other groups, expanding the potential for grassroots groups, unions, and more to connect with human beings in a manner not dictated by the whims of giant corporations’ platforms.

Truthful journalism is an essential public good, and as Google and Meta wage algorithmic warfare against it, it’s essential to protect it. Foundations, donors, and folks connected with money should prioritize journalism alongside other urgent issues, recognizing that trustworthy information is a bulwark against rising fascism.

Finally, we must all adopt a resistance mindset in relation to AI’s slippery slope. Each day, we have an opportunity to choose another way. Resist inevitability. Resist inertia.

Our ability to access facts — and to discern truth from disinformation — is at stake. How will we fight back?

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