Jim Lanzone has seen this movie before. The Yahoo CEO, who previously ran Ask.com and led CBS Interactive, knows what it looks like when Google flexes its dominance in search. But this time, he says, the threat isn’t just to Yahoo. It’s to every publisher, every small business, and every website that depends on organic search traffic to survive.
In a recent interview on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, Lanzone issued one of the most pointed warnings yet from a major tech executive about Google’s AI Mode — the feature that synthesizes answers directly on the search results page, potentially eliminating the need for users to click through to source websites. “If Google is allowed to just take all of that content from the open web and put it into an AI mode answer, and never send the traffic, that is an existential threat to the open web,” Lanzone said, as reported by Search Engine Land.
Existential. Not competitive. Not inconvenient. Existential.
The remark landed at a moment when the search industry is undergoing its most volatile transformation in two decades. Google has been aggressively rolling out AI-powered features — first AI Overviews, now the more expansive AI Mode — that aim to answer user queries comprehensively without requiring a single click to a third-party site. For Google, it’s a defensive play against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI-native search competitors threatening to siphon users away from traditional search. For everyone else on the web, it feels like a land grab.
The Zero-Click Reckoning
The concept of zero-click search isn’t new. For years, SEO professionals and publishers have tracked the growing share of Google searches that end without the user clicking any organic result. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, People Also Ask boxes — Google has steadily expanded the amount of information it surfaces directly on its results pages. Studies from SparkToro and Datos have estimated that roughly 60% of Google searches result in zero clicks.
AI Mode supercharges that trend. Rather than pulling a snippet from a single source, it generates a synthesized answer drawing from multiple websites, often without clear attribution or prominent links back to those sources. The user gets what they need. The publisher gets nothing.
Lanzone framed this in stark economic terms. Websites invest in creating content — news articles, product reviews, how-to guides, medical information — with the expectation that search engines will send readers their way. That traffic funds advertising, supports subscriptions, and keeps businesses operational. Remove the traffic, and the entire value chain collapses. “There won’t be an open web to crawl anymore,” Lanzone warned on CNBC, because content creators will have no economic reason to keep producing.
It’s a feedback loop that could prove destructive. Google’s AI needs fresh, high-quality web content to generate its answers. But if that content stops being created because there’s no traffic incentive, the AI’s answers degrade. Everyone loses.
Yahoo, of course, has its own interests at stake. The company has been investing heavily in rebuilding its search product, and Lanzone has positioned Yahoo as a more publisher-friendly alternative to Google. Yahoo Search, which still commands a small but meaningful share of the market through default partnerships on devices like Verizon phones, sends traffic to websites in the traditional way — users search, they see results, they click. Lanzone is betting that this model, which he calls more sustainable and fair, can attract both users and content partners disillusioned with Google’s direction.
But let’s be clear: Lanzone isn’t just talking his book. His concerns echo those of publishers, antitrust regulators, and even some of Google’s own advertising partners.
The timing of these remarks is significant. Google is currently navigating the aftermath of a landmark federal antitrust ruling that found the company maintained an illegal monopoly in search. Remedies in that case are still being debated, and the Department of Justice has floated proposals that range from behavioral restrictions to a potential forced divestiture of Chrome. The question of how Google uses its search dominance to aggregate and redistribute — or withhold — web traffic is central to those proceedings.
A Broader Industry Backlash Takes Shape
Lanzone isn’t alone in raising the alarm. News publishers have grown increasingly aggressive in pushing back against AI companies that train on or display their content without adequate compensation. The New York Times sued OpenAI. A coalition of publishers has challenged Perplexity AI over its summarization practices. And in Europe, regulators have been moving toward frameworks that would require AI companies to negotiate licensing deals with content creators.
Google has tried to get ahead of the criticism. The company has argued that AI Overviews and AI Mode do include links to source material, and that early data shows these features can actually drive more engaged traffic to websites. In blog posts and public statements, Google executives have maintained that they are committed to supporting the open web and that users who get AI-generated previews are more likely to click through for deeper information.
Publishers aren’t buying it. Not entirely.
The fundamental tension is structural. Google’s business model depends on keeping users within its own properties for as long as possible — more time on Google means more ad impressions, more data collection, more revenue. Every click that sends a user away from Google is, in a narrow sense, a lost monetization opportunity. AI Mode aligns perfectly with that incentive: give the user everything they need without ever leaving Google.
For smaller websites, the stakes are particularly acute. A local news outlet or niche blog doesn’t have the brand recognition to drive direct traffic. It depends on search discovery. If AI Mode cannibalizes that discovery channel, these sites face an existential funding crisis — the very scenario Lanzone described.
And the numbers are already moving. Multiple SEO tracking firms have reported declines in organic click-through rates since Google began expanding AI Overviews to more queries in mid-2024. While comprehensive public data on AI Mode’s specific impact remains limited — Google only recently began rolling it out more broadly — early anecdotal reports from webmasters suggest further traffic erosion for informational queries, which are precisely the types of searches AI Mode is designed to handle.
So what happens next? Several scenarios are in play. Congress could act — there have been hearings and proposed legislation around AI and copyright, though nothing has reached the floor for a vote. The antitrust case could result in remedies that constrain how Google deploys AI in search. Or the market itself could adjust, with publishers increasingly blocking AI crawlers, gating content behind paywalls, or negotiating direct licensing agreements with AI companies.
Some publishers are already taking matters into their own hands. Major media companies have updated their robots.txt files to block AI training crawlers from companies like OpenAI and Google. Others have struck deals — the Associated Press, Axel Springer, and several other organizations have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI, trading content access for cash and attribution commitments. But these deals tend to favor large publishers with significant bargaining power. The long tail of the web — the millions of smaller sites that collectively make the internet useful — has no such leverage point.
Lanzone’s argument ultimately rests on a simple proposition: search engines have historically operated under an implicit social contract. They index the web’s content and, in return, send traffic back to the creators of that content. AI Mode breaks that contract. It takes the value without returning it.
Yahoo’s Bet — and the Question of Alternatives
Whether Yahoo can capitalize on this moment is another question entirely. The company’s search market share in the U.S. remains in the low single digits, dwarfed by Google’s roughly 90% dominance. Lanzone has been making investments — Yahoo acquired the AI-powered search startup Vespa and has been integrating AI into its own products — but competing with Google in search is one of the hardest problems in technology. Many have tried. Most have failed.
What Lanzone may be doing, more strategically, is building a coalition. By positioning Yahoo as the defender of publishers and the open web, he creates potential alliances with content creators, device manufacturers looking for search alternatives, and regulators who want to see more competition. It’s a long play. But given the current antitrust environment and the growing unease among publishers, it’s not an unreasonable one.
The broader question facing the industry is whether the AI-powered search model can be redesigned to sustain the web’s content creation engine, or whether we’re witnessing the beginning of a slow extraction that hollows out the open internet. Google has the resources and the engineering talent to build a model that shares value more equitably — through revenue sharing, prominent attribution, or traffic guarantees. Whether it has the incentive to do so is the real issue.
Right now, the incentives point in the other direction. Google is locked in an arms race with OpenAI, Microsoft, and a growing roster of AI startups, all of which are competing to deliver the most comprehensive, most convenient AI-powered answers. In that race, sending users away to other websites is friction. And in Silicon Valley, friction gets eliminated.
Lanzone is betting that friction — the click, the visit, the human-curated webpage — is actually what makes the web worth having. It’s an old-school argument in an AI-obsessed moment. But it might also be the right one.
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