You’re an internet search giant whose search results are worse than ever, and you honestly believe that AI is going to ruin you. What do you do? If you’re Google, the answer is to buy off the largest source of truly useful information on the internet and lock it down for your exclusive use.

Google struck a $60 million deal to license content from Reddit’s site to train its AI back in February of this year. Now it appears that part of this deal may also give Google exclusive rights to index Reddit for its regular searches. According to investigative journalism site 404 Media, using a non-Google search engine with the modifier “site:reddit.com” currently returns few to no results. We’re headed toward a fragmented web, which, ironically, is the very purpose of Google’s existence in the first place.

"This is an extremely bad deal for the web for several reasons. First, it would create an unnatural monopoly on the vast amount of user-generated content. With thousands of topics worth discussing, Reddit has earned the nickname 'the front page of the internet.' It contains extremely useful and helpful discussions, insights, and facts. Turning such a goldmine of data into the domain of just one search engine goes against the basic principle of a free and accessible internet," Kevin Shahnazari, Tech Lead at Coursera, told Lifewire via email.

Many people know that adding the word “reddit” to a web search has long been a way to get more relevant results. That’s because it’s driven by people sharing opinions, facts, data, recommendations, and so on, the best of which are displayed at the top by Reddit’s voting mechanism. It’s the opposite of a regular Google search, which prioritizes SEO spam, content farms, ads, and other junk over organic results.