For a quarter of a century, the routine has been the same. You did not know something, so you Googled it. A student in Mirpur trying to understand how photosynthesis works before an exam, a small business owner in Jashore looking up a supplier’s number, or a teacher in Sylhet preparing a lesson at midnight; the search bar was always there, pointing you somewhere useful. It was the closest thing the modern world had to a shared library. It was open to everyone, at any hour.
That library is not shutting down. But someone has rearranged it without asking, and if you have opened Google recently, you have already seen what changed.
Before any website link appears, before any advertisement, before the familiar blue list that trained a generation of internet users, there is now a box. Google calls it AI Overview. It reads your question, scans the internet and writes you a composed answer on the spot. You do not have to click anywhere. No scrolling, no comparing sources, no deciding which website to trust. The answer simply appears.
For a growing number of people around the world, this box at the top of the page has become the first and often the last thing they read before closing the tab.
This is not a small tweak. Approximately 1.5 billion users now encounter AI Overviews every month, according to figures cited by Google. Industry-wide SERP monitoring reports show that AI Overviews now appear at the top of more than 60 per cent of all Google searches, a figure that has doubled since August 2024.
Reports also show that in the education sector, the share of queries triggering an AI-generated summary grew from 18 per cent in early 2025 to 83 per cent by the end of 2025. For health-related searches, 88 per cent of queries now produce an AI Overview at the top. This means the next time someone searches for the symptoms of typhoid fever or the correct dose of a common medicine, the first answer they read was written not by a doctor or a journalist but by a machine drawing from thousands of sources at once.
Google is not the only place this is happening. ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022 and was initially seen as a novelty, now draws around 900 million weekly active users worldwide. Industry projections suggest ChatGPT could overtake Google’s total search volume by 2027. Among university students in many countries, asking an AI assistant has already become the default first step, with Google used afterwards only to verify or dig deeper.
Google itself still looks formidable. It processes around 8.5 billion searches every single day and holds roughly 91 per cent of the global search market. These are not the numbers of platforms in crisis. But beneath that dominance, a quiet and consequential shift is underway. It is being felt most sharply by the people who spent years creating the content that Google once directed readers toward.
The old logic of the internet search economy was straightforward. Google showed links. Users clicked them. Websites received traffic. That traffic supported news organisations, researchers, bloggers, health portals and countless small businesses that depended on being found.
That chain is breaking. Zero-click searches now account for around 58.5 per cent of all Google searches, according to a SparkToro analysis. These are searches where users get an answer directly from the results page without visiting any website. For the websites sitting below the AI Overview box, the numbers are alarming.
For news content specifically, the share of searches that resulted in zero clicks to news websites grew. It increased from 56 per cent when AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to 69 per cent in one year. The journalists and writers who produced that content are still doing the work. The readers, and the advertising revenue that follows them, are increasingly not arriving.
There is also the question of reliability. Traditional search asked you to judge the source yourself. You could see who wrote something, when it was published and whether the website was credible. AI answers arrive pre-digested. They are stated with confidence that does not always reflect the quality of the underlying information.
Google is not standing still. The company is investing heavily in improving its AI features and has no intention of giving up the search market it has built over the past two decades. But it faces a difficult reality. Every time it’s AI answers a question at the top of the page, it reduces the need for users to click on the advertisements that support the rest of the system. This creates an internal tension that has no simple solution.
The search bar is not disappearing. But the way people use it is changing, especially among younger users who have grown up expecting direct answers instead of lists of links to explore. It took a generation to build the habit of “Googling” everything. What is replacing it, one AI-generated summary at a time, will likely take another generation to fully understand.
