AI vs Search: The Ouroboros of the internet

There’s an ancient symbol you might’ve seen around on tattoos or dark academia Pinterest boards: a snake eating its own tail. It’s called the Ouroboros, and it represents a cycle of destruction and rebirth, something feeding off itself in perpetuity.

It might seem like an odd metaphor to drag into a conversation about Google and AI chatbots, but hear me out – it’s the perfect image for what’s happening right now in the digital world. AI tools like ChatGPT and search engines like Google are in a kind of tug-of-war. Only instead of pulling in opposite directions, they’re slowly chomping away at each other.

Let me explain.

ChatGPT is stealing Google’s traffic

For decades, Google has been the gateway to the internet. If you needed to know something — from what time a rugby match kicks off to how to unblock a drain with baking soda — Google had your back. But now, people are starting to skip the middleman. Instead of sifting through blue links, they’re turning to AI tools like ChatGPT, which serve up direct, digestible answers in a nice, conversational tone..

And the numbers reflect that. In the US alone, ChatGPT saw a 47% year-on-year user increase, climbing to 39.6 million users as of March 2025, according to a recent report from Momentic Marketing. Google, by contrast, saw a 4% decline in users.

Now, 4% might not sound like much — until you realise that Google’s user base is in the hundreds of millions. A drop that size isn’t just a dip in the pool; it’s a splash big enough to send ripples through the entire content ecosystem.

Google’s trying to play catch-up

At Google I/O 2025, the company made it abundantly clear: they’re not taking this lying down. Their latest AI showcase, Gemini Live, integrates voice, video, camera and web data to give you real-time help, like a virtual assistant with a supercharged brain. They also introduced “AI Overviews,” which essentially summarise your search results for you — a chatbot-style response baked directly into the Google experience.

Cool? Definitely. Useful? Maybe. But here’s where things get interesting — and a bit ironic.

The cannibalism begins

These chatbot-style responses (whether they come from ChatGPT or Google’s own Gemini) rely on existing content from across the web. Blogs, news sites, forums, recipe pages, Wikipedia — all of it forms the foundation for what these bots say. They’ve learned from us. From you.

But here’s the thing: if people stop clicking on links and start just accepting AI answers at face value, that entire ecosystem starts to wobble. Less traffic means less ad revenue for publishers. Which means fewer writers and journalists get paid to produce new content. Which means there’s less fresh, diverse information for the chatbots to draw from.

See the problem?

It’s the Ouroboros, but digital. AI eats search > search loses value > content dries up > AI loses quality > round and round we go.

The first step is awareness

We need to understand how interconnected these systems are — and how easily they can unravel if we’re not careful. Tech giants like OpenAI and Google have a responsibility to support the ecosystems they depend on. That might mean licensing content properly, paying publishers fairly, or finding ways to direct traffic back to creators.

As users, we also have a role to play. Next time you’re searching for something, maybe don’t just stop at the AI summary. Click through. Support the websites doing the hard graft. Share the content you find helpful.

Because if we don’t feed the internet, it won’t be able to feed us.