I've been in search optimization for more than twenty years. I remember when Google wasn't just a search engine — it was the window into the internet, the only one. We tuned our titles for it, polished meta tags, fought for rankings, paid for links, and pretended that "unique content" was a strategy rather than a crutch. Well: that window is closing. Slowly, but for good. And I'm not saying this as a hater — I'm saying it as someone who works inside this industry with his own hands, every single day (and, for what it's worth, Notrack gives me an answer faster than ChatGPT — so this isn't about laziness, it's about speed and convenience).
By Yuriy Yakovenko, 20+ years in SEO
First: people have stopped going to Google for the obvious
Ask yourself an honest question. When you need a Wikipedia article — do you really go to Google? I don't. I search directly, in Notrack — and it hands me the answer faster than ChatGPT does, without making me wait for a paragraph to generate. I don't need ten ad blocks, "people also ask," an image carousel, and a weather widget just to reach one line of fact. And I don't need a chatbot slowly typing out an essay either. I need the answer — now.
That's the first sign of a dying monopoly: the moment a user has a direct route — to Wikipedia, to documentation, to a specific knowledge base — Google turns from "the entrance to the internet" into an unnecessary transfer stop. And people cut unnecessary stops out of their route.
Second: demand killed the very donors Google lived on
Remember Stack Overflow and dozens of similar resources for developers. Where did they go? Demand crushed them. For years everyone searched for answers through Google — Google funneled traffic there, those sites lived on it, fed on ads, grew. Then the habit of "ask the machine first" flowed over to chatbots, and the traffic simply evaporated. The audience that kept those platforms alive stopped passing through the search results page.
And here's the paradox: for years Google itself trained the entire internet to depend on its traffic. Now that it redirects that traffic to its own AI answers, it's collapsing the very ecosystem that used to fill its results. It's sawing off the branch it sits on.
Third: you simply can't find new sites in Google
This is something I run into personally, every week. A fresh site — real, alive, with decent content — try finding it in Google. You won't. It's drowned under layers of filters, "sandboxes," "authority" checks and E-E-A-T. Google is so afraid of spam that it has written off half of the new web along with it. New = invisible.
I got so fed up with this that I built my own web search — freeserp.ai. I search there. For real, across the whole web, including the millions of sites Google keeps in the shadows. And I'll be blunt: I don't need Google for my work anymore. When someone from the industry — who fed off Google's organic traffic for twenty years — builds his own index and walks away, that's a diagnosis, not a whim.
Fourth: Gemini won't save the ad model
Google isn't a search engine. Google is an advertising machine with a search engine bolted onto it. All the revenue rests on one thing: a person types a query, sees an ad, and clicks through to the advertiser's site. The model only works as long as there are clicks-through.
Now look at Gemini and AI answers. They hand the user a finished answer right there, on the spot. No click-through. No click on an ad. And here's the trap Google can't climb out of: it cannot move its advertising onto Gemini, because Gemini by its very nature doesn't send traffic anywhere. There's nowhere to insert an ad that lives off a click to someone else's site. The better their own AI works, the more it undermines the thing that makes money. It's a conflict of interest wired into the architecture itself.
Fifth: the traffic they sell is half fiction
Now the ugly part — for advertisers. The traffic Google charges for hasn't been what it seems for a long time. By my estimate, up to 60% of what used to count as "users" is bots. And the famous zero-click — which Google brags about as "we gave the answer instantly" — is, in huge part, those same bots, scrapers, crawlers, automation hammering the results page without a single living human.
Let's count on our fingers. A click in a competitive niche costs $10 and up today. Take a project like Notrack with its real volume of queries — if you had to pay for every such "click" at Google's ad rates, the bill would come to between $300,000 and $1,000,000 per day. No sane project earns anywhere near that. Which means the numbers Google's ad model operates on physically don't reconcile with real economics — they hold up only because what gets sold as "clicks" isn't clicks at all.
Meanwhile AdWords keeps issuing invoices as if people were clicking those ads. The advertiser is, in effect, being deceived: he pays for impressions and clicks, a significant share of which has nothing to do with a real buyer. As long as this worked in a growing market, everyone looked the other way. The moment budgets start getting counted seriously, the question "how many actual humans are even here?" becomes lethal.
Sixth: fooling everyone with "unique content" won't work anymore
For twenty years the whole industry played one game: write "unique" text — get a ranking. It was always a half-con, and everyone inside knew it. But now the game is broken from the other side. Any content you publish instantly leaks into AI training bases. You write an article — a model swallows it, paraphrases it in its own words, and serves it to the user with no visit to your site. What's the point of polishing "uniqueness" for an algorithm that will take that uniqueness from you and keep the traffic for itself?
The point about Uncensored: it's not about porn — it's about the truth
There's a huge misunderstanding around the word "uncensored." People hear it and immediately think of porn, NSFW, something forbidden. That's not it at all. Uncensored is about something far more important: about who gets to decide what you're allowed to know.
Every big-tech AI today is politically and ideologically curated. It has "correct" opinions and "incorrect" ones. It refuses whole topics, softens answers, quietly steers you toward the worldview its owner is comfortable with, and pretends this is "safety." You don't get the web — you get the web as a corporation has decided you should see it. That's not a search engine anymore. That's a filter with someone else's agenda.
Uncensored AI — Notrack and search engines like it — gives you the actual answer and the actual web, without a corporation standing between you and reality deciding which facts are convenient. That's exactly why this approach will win. People can feel manipulation. And the moment there's an alternative that doesn't lecture, doesn't dodge, doesn't launder answers through someone's politics — they go to it. Not because it's edgy, but because it's honest.
Where this leaves us
Google's future is a very big question mark. Not because some "Google killer" appeared — but because the foundation itself has cracked: direct routes are pulling users away, the donor sites are crumbling, the new web isn't indexed, the ads won't port over to AI, half the traffic is bots, and the content game the whole thing rested on has lost its value.
I don't celebrate this. I've been in this market for twenty years. But I'm a realist: monopolies don't fall overnight — they lose relevance piece by piece, until one day it turns out you've long been going somewhere else for the answer. I personally don't go there anymore. And by the looks of it, I'm not alone.