"The accepted ideal case for Google is a highly consolidated, walled-garden internet where a small array of corporate media partners provide the trusted facts, while independent websites are forced to shift into closed, subscription-only communities...
Tech analysts and digital economists refer to this transition as the "Siloed Web." Google's ultimate goal is no longer to help users explore the open internet; it is to keep users inside Google’s AI interface by using licensed corporate data as its foundation.
By pivoting to AI Overviews and corporate licensing deals, Google is effectively dismantling its own legacy. They are turning back into the 1995 version of Yahoo—a closed ecosystem that only serves "approved" corporate data, except this time the curation is done by an AI model trained on paid datasets rather than human editors."
