Neal K. Shah: Google just patented the right to replace your website with its own

I built my company on a simple bet, that if you created something genuinely useful for families in crisis, the internet would help them find you. For years, that bet has paid off. When a daughter in Raleigh is awake at 2 a.m. caring for her elderly mother with dementia, desperately searching for “senior caregiver near me” or “in-home senior care” to get help, she quickly finds the CareYaya caregiving platform at the top of the search rankings. She clicks through to our website, researches our caregiving solutions, reads stories from the families we’ve helped, and is soon connected with affordable, quality care help. That entire journey, from fear to relief, begins with a simple click to our website.

But a few weeks ago, Google quietly patented a system that could make that click completely disappear.

Without much press coverage, the U.S. Patent Office granted Google patent US12536233B1, titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” and the proposal is alarming. Google’s system would evaluate your website’s landing page using metrics like bounce rate, conversion rate, and something it calls “page design quality.” If your site falls below a threshold that Google sets, then the search engine would then generate its own AI version of your page, dynamically assembled from your content, the user’s search history, and whatever Google’s models determine is most likely to keep that user inside Google’s ecosystem.

As someone who leads a technology startup that thrives on rapidly growing internet traffic from families, this is quite concerning. When a man caring for his wife with dementia in Washington DC searches for “affordable caregivers near me”, CareYaya reliably pops up at the top of the search rankings, helping the family quickly get the help they need. The search’s credibility, the message of the market about what is the top choice for people similar to them, and the click through to our site, is the process that enables the fulfillment of someone’s search intent. With that perspective, I read this new patent as a directional signal from the most powerful gatekeeper in the history of commerce. And the direction is unmistakable: Google is building the infrastructure to intermediate every relationship between a business and its customers.

The patent arrives in a business landscape already devastated by Google’s AI ambitions. According to data from the Reuters Institute and Chartbeat, Google search traffic to publishers fell by a third in 2025. A major study by Seer Interactive found that organic click-through rates plummeted 61% on queries where Google’s AI Overviews appeared. Nearly 70% of all Google searches now end without the user clicking a single link. This shift in AI Overviews and disintermediating clicks and traffic, is already destroying the economic viability of journalism and the news media. The “open web” isn’t dying of natural causes, but being swallowed whole by an internet giant that is desperate to grab larger slices of the pie.

For healthcare, the stakes are also quite uniquely dangerous. Up to 76% of healthcare website traffic originates from search, and 83% of patients use hospital or provider websites when choosing where to seek care. Think about what that means if Google starts replacing provider landing pages with AI-generated versions. A family researching in-home care options for aging parents in Cary wouldn’t see the testimonials that actual families wrote. They wouldn’t see the caregiver photos, the quality details, or the nuanced language that helps distinguish a high-quality senior care provider like CareYaya from a random mom-and-pop operation. They’d simply see whatever Google’s model decided was “optimized” for their query. And Google’s optimization serves Google’s interests, not the patient’s or family’s.

Also to be clear, I am not an AI skeptic. I write from the perspective of having spent years working at the intersection of AI innovation and caregiving. As the Principal Investigator leading the NIH- and Johns Hopkins-funded YayaGuide AI project, I’ve helped develop an AI system to better train dementia caregivers across the country, one that I believe can better serve the 10 million Americans caring for loved ones with dementia. Through my work leading Counterforce Health, we’ve built an AI system that rapidly fights health insurance claim denials for patients, clinics and rural hospitals. I fully believe that AI can be extraordinary when it serves the people. But, I think this Google patent doesn’t describe AI serving the people. It describes AI serving one platform, and one that already controls where 90% of the world’s searches begin.

The search industry’s reaction has been visceral. Prominent analyst Glenn Gabe warned that if AI Overviews have already angered website owners, AI-generated landing pages would be exponentially worse. Lily Ray, a leading search strategist, called Google’s patent “terrifying.” One digital marketing director captured the deeper concern: AI is starting to look less like a tool that empowers everyone and more like a mechanism for consolidating power at the top.

That consolidation of power could soon have real-world victims. Small healthcare practices that spent years building trust through thoughtful websites could watch their digital storefronts get hijacked by an algorithm that knows nothing about their communities. Startups like mine, which depend on organic search discovery and authentic storytelling to reach families navigating the worst days of their lives, could find their voices flattened into Google’s homogenized AI output. The 63 million American caregivers, people already stretched to the breaking point, would lose yet another reliable way to find help through CareYaya that they desperately need.

So what do we do? First, we demand regulatory attention. The FTC and DOJ are already scrutinizing Google’s monopoly in search. I think this patent should be Exhibit A in any argument that Google is not merely organizing information but actively replacing the businesses that create it. Second, we should rapidly build moats that algorithms can’t replicate, like direct community relationships, referral networks, and trusted human connections that exist outside any platform’s reach. Third, we can insist that AI in critical sectors like healthcare must be held to a higher standard than “whatever converts best.”

Every entrepreneur who ever stayed up late perfecting their homepage, every small healthcare practice that painstakingly built a site patients could trust, they all operated on the same assumption I did: build something real, and the internet will connect you to the people who need it. Google’s patent suggests a future where that assumption no longer holds. Where the road between you and your customer runs through Google’s new AI-oriented living room, and Google gets to redecorate whenever it wants.

The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. We should fight like hell to make sure it stays that way.

Neal K. Shah is an NIH-funded Principal Investigator on the YayaGuide AI for Caregiver Training project that he started at Johns Hopkins, and CEO of CareYaya, a social enterprise connecting thousands of college students to care for older adults in their communities. Neal also serves on North Carolina's Steering Committee on Aging.