Matt Rickard talks about how Google’s search results will get progressively worse by major sites going behind login or paywalls:

Google will lose results, site by site — it will be Google Search’s death by a thousand cuts.

[..]

One by one, search results become dead links and are removed from the index. Users will start to rely on site-specific searches behind walled gardens. The first page of search results will not only be filled with ads but will be missing key results. Google may try to augment results with AI-generated answers, but (1) not all of these answers will be good enough, and (2) the data needed to train these answers will increasingly be found behind login or paywalls. Search might progressively get worse over the years until a new alternative arises.

The only real option that Google has is to cut a deals with Twitter and Reddit and everybody else. But is that financially scalable? Maybe everyone else will cut deal as its mutually beneficial. It keeps driving traffic to content sites and it keeps Google relevant.

I just don’t know how scalable that can be.