For more than two decades, a simple handshake has shaped how people find information online. It works like this: Websites allow Google’s web crawler to index their content so it can appear in search results. The websites get traffic, and Google gets to be Google — one of the most valuable companies on Earth, on account of organizing all this information, putting ads alongside it and building lucrative tools on top of it all.

But what happens when one half of that bargain disappears? That was on my mind Tuesday when Google unveiled “AI Overviews” at its annual developers’ conference. It’s an unassuming name for a hugely significant update to its search engine, one that — if it works as intended — could significantly reduce the amount of traffic that websites receive.