The End of Google's "10 Blue Links" Era

Why website publishers and bloggers are freaking out over the wrong thing.

I really liked Google’s Doodle to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Route 66. I find it very apropos to the wonky Internet website business stuff I’m going to rant about today, and you’ll see why below…

“May you live in interesting times” is the most ancient of curses, and it sure is an interesting time to be in the Internet publishing business.

Oh brother!

Right now, my timeline is flooded with blog writers and digital publishers like me panicking over the news from Google I/O this week. In case you missed the TechCrunch and New York Times obituaries about Google changing its default search box for the first time in 35 years, the era of the “ten blue links” after you click “search” is officially dead. More or less, Google doesn’t want you to click on websites anymore… Google Zero has finally arrived, and traffic-and-display-advertising addicted writers and editors are steamed.

Instead of serving up a simple, ranked list of websites to answer your questions, Google is rolling out an “intelligent search box” that drops users directly into AI-powered interactive experiences. They’re unleashing “information agents” to scour the web 24/7 on your behalf. Google says they’ll be using something called “generative UI” from the ginormous galaxies of information they’ve sucked into their algorithmic data vortex over the years when you look for an answer to something, saying they’ll now serve users custom widgets on the fly.

In short, the search engine is becoming an answer engine. It’s been going this direction for years now, and the metamorphosis for how we search the Internet is finally complete.

And the consensus among my peers in the Internet publishing world is that Google is destroying the open web.

They are.

And they don’t care.

Honestly, that callousness sucks for a lot of us who have spent decades making a living as writers and bloggers on the open web. It’s important to acknowledge how important this basic behavior has been to the economics of the open web as a whole: people seeking a piece of information via Google and tapping a link in the results to read it pose a grave threat to the livelihoods we love.

But also… I’m not convinced it’s the end of the world.

Earlier this week, after a day-long drive from Southern Utah back to Los Angeles, I collapsed on my couch, opened X, and immediately noticed the collective foot-stomping from people who make their livelihood in a similar way to how I do: Writing about timely and topical information that aligns with a defined audience that wants to read it, via a series of distributed traffic sources.

Part of me wanted to join in. Group tantrums, when done together, can be incredibly cathartic.

But then the road fatigue cleared, and I took a deep breath and collected my thoughts.

I think fear and scorn from writer-and-digital-media types are only one dimension of understanding what’s actually going on in the larger advertising technology and media economy.

Specifically, I considered how much time I actually spend talking to BroBible advertisers, listening to their needs, and vetting advertising opportunities to ensure they align with our mutual business goals.

And I realized… I have a contrarian take on the matter. I know it might be unpopular with my peers in publishing.

Oh well.

The “Infinite Money Glitch” Traffic Era Is Over

You can really tell which publishers never talk to the performance-obsessed marketers on the other side of the advertising marketplace…

AKA, the people who actually BUY the ads running on your websites.

I do.

Very often.

There’s this incredibly dangerous idea in digital media that there is a bottomless well of advertising dollars waiting to be harvested, just so long as you get eyeballs to written content.

It completely ignores the effectiveness of what those ads are actually there to accomplish.

And those dollars, in tremendous aggregate flowing through Google’s pipes, come from someone else’s pockets.

Change sucks. But perspective is more important.

For two decades, digital publishing operated under the assumption of an infinite money glitch: just get enough traffic to a site to create demand for display inventory, and the cash will seamlessly follow. The more traffic (aka readers) you drove to fire ads, the more money you made from a complicated pipeline of 300x250 ads running through Google Ad Manager. That was the whole deal.

Google isn’t doing this because they hate us.

They are making this change because that era is actively riding off into the sunset, because marketers don’t want to write the check to fund it.

Brett McKay recently penned a brilliant post-mortem on this exact shift with banner ads over at his Dying Breed Substack, charting how programmatic ad tech and algorithmic serfdom successfully turned the open web into an unreadable digital graveyard. I was genuinely honored when he asked me to jump into that series to offer my own two cents on the affiliate side of the house. Specifically, how the relentless gamification of commerce content has resulted in the absolute “SkyMall-ification” of the internet. It’s a snake eating its own tail, fueled by misaligned incentives, bad actors like browser extensions and coupon sites, and an industry that forgot how to talk to human beings in the quest to drive a sale that they get a small piece of.

TLDR:

The golden age of passive traffic monetization is over.

If you don’t understand buy-side advertising decision-making in the Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) era as a website publisher in 2026, you are missing the plot and how the dollars flow into these systems that support ad-supported Internet publishing in the first place.

Every single dollar on a media plan is hyper-scrutinized by marketing teams. Including those rich-media display ads on your site from a pool of millions of brands that are spending money as part of a larger Google ecosystem buy.

Display advertising against text content notoriously yields horrible Click-Through Rates (CTRs)—sometimes lower than 1%. (And yes, before the programmatic buyers reading this start yelling at me about “view-through attribution” and how these Google ad systems track impressions to quantify value across a convoluted user journey—I know. I know how the ad-tech data-triangulation sausage is made. But stay with me on the fundamental math here.)

If it’s not putting a customer in a funnel where they actually go do something of value for the advertiser, what’s the point of spending the money?

Imagine walking up to a roulette wheel where your odds of hitting are less than 1 in 100. Mama didn’t raise a fool, so you’d not just walk away from the table… you’d probably leave the casino entirely knowing just how stacked the odds are against you.

Yet, publishers expect marketers to keep blindly dropping chips on that exact same wheel, while the tables next to them (TikTok, Meta, Retail Media, creators, email, podcasts, splashy PR-channel brand activations) are paying out steadily.

Marketers aren’t stupid. They are just moving their money to the winning tables.

And it isn’t banner ads.

Think about how you used to watch linear TV back in the day. When the commercials came on, you got up to get a snack.

Banner ads are the digital equivalent of that snack break. Readers mentally tune them out, scroll right past them, or just install an ad blocker. They’re there for the text and information served against them, which gets into your viewable range to fire an impression for an exchange of value.

Look at this mess… SIX ad units above the fold on a Metro.Co.UK story about the All-American Rejects. You really think Google finds this UX so precious that it wants to drive people to it?

Hell no.

They would much rather keep the masses in their own systems, where they get to keep the pie, rather than splitting it up.

If you are a marketer obsessed with RoAS, paying for that passive, ignored inventory is a terrible deal. They are clearly seeing less and less ROI there than with other Google advertising products.

If advertisers don’t find programmatic display systems as effective as new channels (TikTok, Meta, Amazon, retail media) or new alternatives within Google, they won’t keep pouring money into them.

Route 66 and Internet Information Businesses

This open-web system has existed for almost 30 years now. Think of it like Route 66.

When Route 66 was built, it was a modern marvel. Mom-and-pop gas stations (publishers) thrived on the endless migration of traffic along the Mother Road (the Google SERP) from Chicago to Los Angeles.

But then Interstate 40 opened up… faster, more efficient, and built for modern needs.

The mom-and-pop gas stations and hamburger joints that refused to adapt and move died. The ones that secured real estate by the new super-highway survived.

Google’s AI Search, social video, and retail media are the new interstates. Information technology has simply evolved to better service marketers’ needs and ad dollars.

If your entire business model depends on waiting for traffic on Route 66, you are going to become a ghost town.

My theory is that Google is signaling it likely doesn’t care about the future of ineffective display-unit advertising. They’re visionary in their business thinking; they know who their customers are and why they spend money; and they’ve weighed the business risk of slowly killing it off against growing their cumulative ad-share pie in other ways.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but pulling off a pivot this massive requires a calculated bet on an unfathomable scale. Think: The relocation of billions of ad dollars a quarter to inch Google’s market cap up… eventually, in due time. Love it or hate it, 6.5% to 7% of the S&P 500 index’s total weight depends on it. That’s a lot of value to the collective economy as a whole via retirement funds for all this to backfire.

They’d rather marketers invest in YouTube, CTV, and their new AI Search targeting capabilities to keep dollars fully in their ecosystem, rather than flowing through ad tech products where it gets sliced up to news sites like the one above, or “content sites” as some channels love calling us (…I hate that term, but it is what it is).

The incentives of digital media for us open-web, ad-dependent writer types exist in a symbiotic relationship with the larger digital marketing ecosystem and its many codependent micro-ecosystems.

Your Audience is Your Only Real Moat

I know I sound like I’m carrying water for a multi-trillion-dollar tech behemoth, but savvy creators figured this out a long time ago in their business models.

They know they lose sponsors on their YouTube reads, podcasts, or newsletters if they don’t perform on a metric beyond mere “awareness.”

This is exactly why owning the relationship is everything. Your audience is your only real moat.

If you have power-users and fans, focus on them first and foremost.

There’s a reason platforms like Substack and Beehiiv have exploded… their entire value prop is built on direct connection. Too many open web publishers have spent years gamifying Google to hit business goals instead of actually caring about WHO is reading them. I know that, having been that guy, because it made business sense to be that guy. You can win them over with content, but it is just not special enough on its own to stand out anymore in a very noisy Internet that can barely watch two seconds of a short-form video. If people don’t care about what you have to say or who you are when you strip Google’s distribution away, you don’t have a business.

I’m actually optimistic about this change. Publishers with real, quantifiable audiences that aren’t wholly dependent on Google for traffic can still compete for ad dollars just like creators do. I count my lucky stars that BroBible still commands a massive, direct daily readership thanks to the ways we carved out some mindshare with our work 15+ years ago… guys who still type our URL straight into the browser, usually bored out of their minds at their jobs when they’re tethered to a desk, out of sheer muscle memory because we’ve been a staple of their media diet for a decade and a half.

So how does the ad-supported Internet publishing business model adapt?

Here is how you actually adapt to the new reality:

So, How Does The Ad-Supported Internet Publishing Business Model Adapt?

Here is how you actually adapt to the new reality:

The Publisher’s Survival Playbook

#1. Push back on PR channels

In 2024, a study came out that PR professionals now outnumber reports SIX TO ONE. Think about that… for every one writer or reporter, there’s a team of people getting paid behind the scenes to place a story with them.

That’s crazy!

PR professionals are the ultimate gatekeepers to how a brand thinks, and it’s literally their job to talk to you because they want you to make them look good. This is good intel for how advertising is sold. So, learn how to collectively and aggressively demand ad spend, or route to the people in your media business who lead these conversations. Because just like bartering in a marketplace, it is, indeed, always a conversation.

Do this often. I can already feel the PR professionals reading this rolling their eyes, because this makes their jobs harder. Oh well again, but not sorry!

Yes, there are exceptions. Draw lines in the sand out of principle, but know when to step over them when the alignment makes sense. If a publicist pitches me early access to a movie, an interview with a pro athlete, a press trip for a travel feature, or a genuinely cool, aspirational experience that actually provides cultural value to my readers, I will gladly step over the line.

But if you read any of the books on buying attention (like Faris Yakob’s Paid Attention), there is a core economic principle that boils down to this: Attention is a scarce currency. If a brand is asking an audience to actually DO something—like click a link, enter a funnel, or buy a product—they have to pay for that transaction (I’ve written about this a couple of times on Substack here most recently, and also here).

So, if you’re repping a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), e-commerce, Quick Service Restaurant (QSR), Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) startup, consumer tech, or fintech brand, pitching me a “revolutionary” new flavor of hard seltzer, a Bluetooth-enabled water bottle, or a disruptive new mattress? Meh. Miss me with it. Try to avoid the temptation of filing that easy story about the return of the quadruple baconator. Your client’s product launch is a commercial disguised as content, not news. Consider the supply chain in the flow of a message with a specific agenda: The brand makes money. The PR agency gets its retainer. If you publish their pitch for free, you are the only person in that entire transaction working for zero dollars.

Do you think William Randolph Hearst could have ever built a newspaper empire by printing free front-page news about every general store in San Francisco having a 4th of July sale? No way! He told them to stop bothering his editors and talk to the sales department.

Stop being the unpaid distribution arm for corporate marketing budgets because they have “news” that’s beneficial only to themselves. Find or amplify stories that serve your audience and broaden YOUR relationship with THAT AUDIENCE, not a goal quantified by a wrap report you’ll never see that someone is getting paid to put together for their client with MUVs next to your publisher name.

Yes, they will almost always push back on your request to do something paid (which, obviously and legally, will have to be disclosed).

They will probably also get annoyed that you put them in touch with someone on your sales or business development team. That’s OK! It’s part of their jobs. It’s your job to give them your boundaries on what qualifies for a good story that also supports your livelihood in this new Google Zero reality.

They may also stop pitching you, including down the line when they move on to another role where there actually might be a good, valuable opportunity, especially if there’s no basic humanity in your approach here. Be professional. Be decent.

But also, here’s a reality: You, the writer, editor, publisher, creator, etc., pushing back on them actually teaches them how to do their jobs better, too, and helps them realize the financial fragility of the information ecosystem as a whole. We exist in a deeply symbiotic ecosystem. The absolute best PR people realize this. If our media business models evaporate because we gave away the milk for free and the platforms took away all the once-reliable traffic streams that created the ad inventory to support us, their email pitch lists vanish right along with us.

If the publishers starve first, the publicists are next.

#2. Push back on affiliate teams (I am stoked to finally say this out loud):

You have an audience. You have eyeballs. You have the exact same ability to lead people to take action as any TikTok creator or Instagram influencer… You just do it through a text-based medium with quantifiable eyeballs. Hopefully, you’ve evolved the way text-based messages reach audiences beyond an Internet domain in today’s information-distribution environment on social media (podcasts, newsletters, video, social publishing, etc all count here!) Stop accepting whatever scraps the affiliate networks hand out unless you have a tried-and-true way to scale it. Quantify exactly what your audience can drive in terms of sales, and turn that into a distinct, premium ad product that correlates with a real performance goal.

#3. Learn social advertising!

It’s a platform world these days, and that sandbox is constantly evolving. Understand the ins and outs of how creators work with brands on social platforms and apply it to your business.

For example, did you know that whitelisting ads with a reputable, established internet publisher that has a big, defined audience and a good, consistent publishing rapport with Meta can actually help an advertiser drive a lower Customer Acquisition Cost? Advertisers love entities that help them find efficiency because it makes them look good and helps them hit their goals.

This ties back to step #1 and step #2. Learn to meet people where they are, with a message and medium that work for them. They likely want you to be there, too, if they really jive with who you are as a publishing brand.

This is basic Business 101: if you can solve someone else’s expensive headache, you suddenly have a very lucrative opportunity on your hands.

#4. Diversify the product stack

Duh. Stop relying on a single traffic source like Google to find eyeballs for the points above. Again, podcasts, newsletters, video, social publishing, paywalls, etc., all count here! Basically, anything that piques the interest of a defined audience. Writers, know there are other traffic-driving platforms out there for how people read, beyond Google. Learn to unlock them (sorry, but you’re going to have to pay me to get more specific here).

Find the unique thing that makes you sticky beyond content in itself in someone’s daily media diet. Any good publisher should have been doing this years ago, going back to when Google started gaslighting everyone in the E.A.T.T. era.

If your career and income depend on the flow of ad dollars through Google’s open web ecosystem and the trade of traffic for ads in itself, it’s time to learn new lanes. Step into the shoes of the marketers writing the checks to figure out where you belong in the bazaar.

What do you think? Are publishers too addicted to “traffic” to survive the shift to performance? And who in the publishing world is actually getting this right right now? Let me know in the comments below, and subscribe if you want more unapologetic takes on the future of media.

And here’s that Google Doodle video on Route 66. I thought it was excellent.