Occam’s razor. We know for a fact that websites are are stopping web crawlers to try and prevent the AI which is going to reduce the searchability in the search engine

We know that there are more websites being created now than in the past every single day

Combine these two things and it’s going to mean that search engines are less useful

Conspiracies help no one and they are very very rarely accurate when they are accurate it’s because there is not a single conceivable possible simple solution to the problem

In this case, there is a simple solution that answers everything. So why there could be and there probably is intelligent design behind why things have gone worse the chances of it being the main reason is zero