AJ Chronicles: Google Just Changed the way We’re Going to Find Culture

This week we collected 107 stories on ArtsJournal. Here’s what I learned.

I bet you didn’t watch Google I/O last week, and why would you? It’s a tech-industry product announcement. But it’s significant because the company is so integrated into the way the internet works that the event is a de facto guide to where the web is going and how we’ll use it. What Google presented this month was revolutionary, a declaration that the web as we know it is dead, and an operating manual for how the new web will work. More important, it suggests how we all will find — or fail to find — culture over the next decade.

Twenty years ago, tech platforms inserted themselves between artist and audience and quietly rewrote the rules of the relationship. Discovery became algorithmic. This shifted cultural value from the culture itself to the traffic or attention that culture generated, flattening the value of “content” so that provocative or incendiary or nostalgic beats anything else. The connective tissue between makers and communities — the critics, the curators, the alt-weeklies, the record stores, the civic institutions that brokered between artists and audiences — got bypassed. The platforms didn’t replace that contextual value, they monetized its absence. And it has undermined and sabotaged traditional culture models ever since.

The middleware that connected artists to the public was extracted, not replaced. Over the past year, that extraction has accelerated sharply. Google’s AI Overviews have eaten the search-referrals that kept the economy of the open web viable. Chartbeat data shows global publisher traffic from Google down by roughly a third. Google traffic to small publishers is down 60 percent. When an Overview appears, the click-through rate on the top-ranked result collapses. About 58 percent of searches now end in zero clicks. The chatbot referrals supposedly replacing them account for less than 1 percent of publisher page views.

Why does this matter to an arts organization? Because the same pipeline is what’s made you visible. It displays your listing, your review, your interview, your season announcement, your ticket processor.

Media observer Matt Pearce wrote a piece at NiemanLab this week that frames the essential shift. Pearce’s essay — You couldn’t create a more anti-news internet if you tried — suggests something that arts people will recognize immediately. The platforms drove the cost of producing content to zero, the cost of encountering it to near-zero, and in doing so drove the cognitive cost — the work of figuring out what’s worth your attention — through the roof. The critics and curators and editors the lords of the early internet derided as gatekeepers weren’t blocking access. They were doing cognitive labor on the audience’s behalf. Strip them out and you don’t get a freer, more-informed public. You get one in which every individual is asked to do the filtering and sorting work institutions used to do, at a scale no individual can manage. Pearce calls it a cognitive tax. Harmon Siegel makes the parallel case for visual art in Artforum this month. What the platforms stripped out of culture wasn’t gatekeeping. It was meaning-making.

So this is the context for what Google announced at I/O. Not better search. A replacement for searching. The product names matter less than the function: a 24/7 personal AI agent that lives in the cloud and “takes action on your behalf”; a universal shopping cart that follows you across Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Gemini and decides when you should buy; intelligent eyewear shipping this fall to narrate the physical world into your ear. Together they pose a single proposition: We want to insert an agent between you and everything around you.

This is the middleware Google helped dismantle coming back but as a single proprietary intelligence layer owned by the company that profited from demolishing it in the first place. What the new layer mediates is no longer just retrieval, it determines truth, decision, culture, and preference. The agent decides what’s worth paying attention to, what to buy, and what’s true about the world. Discovery on your own terms doesn’t just get harder, it moves inside a black box optimized for values you can’t see and didn’t set.

Few of us will escape. The part of the web your agent is reading is no longer mostly human. Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report — Bots in the Agentic Age — finds automated traffic now accounts for 53% of all web traffic. Human activity is 47% and falling fast. Bots scrape, summarize, rank, and answer for one another and the human reader is incidental.

This month a study reported that AI has passed the Turing Test. Synthetic content is already culturally generative: Florida now has a web of AI-produced “news” sites competing with real journalists; Alberta’s separatist movement is being fueled by AI-generated anthems and videos that look and sound like grassroots culture. The Point observed this month that BookTok sells enormous numbers of books and produces almost no real criticism or context. That is exactly what the platforms engineered: discovery without meaning-making.

For an arts organization trying to be found, this is becoming the new logic. Most of the traffic touching your website isn’t a person. The few people who do find you got there through someone else’s algorithm, and soon, someone else’s agent. The incentives, the exchange of value, and what even counts as being found have all shifted.

But it isn’t only discovery that’s at stake. It’s relationship.

For two centuries our culture worked because audiences had direct, repeated, locally-mediated contact with the people and institutions that made it. You knew your bookstore. You read your critic. You went to your hall. The first two decades of platform algorithms frayed those connections. The next decade, the one Google has now announced, proposes to replace them altogether. The agent meets the institution on your behalf. The agent decides what you should care about. The agent narrates the world into your ear. Your community’s contact with culture becomes contact with a proprietary interface that owns the relationship.

So how should artists think about this? The reflexive argument that “AI is coming for the arts” is unproductive and, in its current form, unwinnable. The argument worth making is a more systemic one (and hence more difficult to act on). The infrastructure Big Tech is building to replace the destructive layer it already inserted between artist and audience is built on values that are corrosive to traditional culture. The AI those companies are using was trained on the collective labor of humanity — writers, musicians, scholars, photographers, and the institutions whose work was taken without consent. Whatever else AI is, it isn’t theirs to own.

But AI isn’t a magic box. It is designed. It is shaped by the values of the companies that make it. If we don’t insist on a different design, one that preserves, or—dream big—enhances the relationship between audiences and the institutions that make culture in their communities, Google and its peers will decide for all of us what culture we can find. And so it becomes the definer what we can trust. Ultimately it decides whether what happens on a stage or in a gallery in your city is something a human being can still locate at all. Already, if your art lives outside what the algorithms optimize for, you’re effectively invisible online.

A few months ago, I wrote about a scenario in which this kind of agentic future could be a powerful new way for artists and arts organizations to cultivate new relationships with their communities. I still believe that. But this month’s Google I/O makes it clear that the window is closing fast for control of who finds what and how online.

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Also Worth Your Attention

The excellence-vs-inclusion pendulum is swinging back, fast. Arts Council England’s retreat from DEI and reversion to “excellence” is the most visible example but not the only one. Heinz Endowments are dropping grants to individual artists. The Doris Duke Foundation is explicitly funding “resilient models for the future as well as legacy models”. Florida’s legislature is letting the Secretary of State rank arts groups ahead of the state arts council’s own list. These aren’t the same policies, but they all reflect a discomfort with the past decade’s funding philosophies and a search for criteria more fitted to the current political weather. The map of what excellence can be is bigger than this swing in priorities — but the swing is going to define which institutions get funded for the next half-decade.

Spotify’s AI defense tells you where the platforms are headed. Spotify’s CEO arguing that the company’s AI music tools offer users and creators “a better alternative to piracy and unregulated AI slop” is the new platform position. We’ll make the AI ourselves, on our terms, and frame it as protection. YouTube auto-labeling AI video is the strategy from the other direction. The platforms are no longer asking whether they should host synthetic content — they’re competing to be the trusted custodian of it. That changes the terms of every conversation rights-holders and creators are about to have.

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Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. Want to support our work? Subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free newsletters. Or better yet, support us with a premium ArtsJournal subscription at $5/week or $52/year. Much appreciated.