Google has been getting worse since before AI, it’s because it’s advantage stemmed from indexing the public web, but as the web turned into a half a dozen walled gardens it lost that edge.

It’s losing customers to AI so it’s trying to clone their features, pretty, but it’s been trying this with just regurgitating Wikipedia for a while.

I don’t know for sure but I suspect internally the incompetent middle management layer are pushing AI usage as a metric and forcing engineers to ruin their best product because management don’t know the value of Google (because they are by and large morons who use AI).

The AI usage can be avoided with other search engines but the walled garden problem is here to stay, on a closed Internet search is always going to suck.