Scott Wetterschneider was absent-mindedly scrolling through his feed on the social platform X in July when he came across a post that made his stomach drop. 

It was a Pew Research Center report on how Google's AI Overviews changed how people used the search engine. Wetterschneider immediately checked his inbox and suddenly pieced together a mystery that had been on his mind for months: His content that he had spent the last 10 years working on had been scraped. 

"I was like, is that what is happening?" Wetterschneider told The Cool Down. 

Wetterschneider works in the niche field of virtual toy design. He built his website in 2011 to showcase his projects and, in 2024, began using it to answer common questions from aspiring designers, establishing himself as a trusted resource in his industry. 

Part of why he decided to invest time in his website was because he thought Google Search would remain consistent and trustworthy, unlike social media platforms, which felt like they were constantly changing.  

"I was counting on [my] website to perform, to compensate," he told The Cool Down.

While he didn't formally track his website traffic and didn't generate advertising revenue from it, he told The Cool Down that his ranking on Google Search served as free advertising that helped him secure jobs. In the past, he had received many emails from studios and independent artists who wanted to work with him after discovering his site on Google. 

But over the last year, he noticed his inbox count had lowered significantly. When he came across the report in July, he pieced together that it was most likely due to Google's AI Overview summaries.

This literally shut me down. I used to get clients who want to make toys because they visited my site for blog posts and information.

Now they don't need to. Google scraped my content and regurgitates it at the top of the search.

Zero visitors now. No clients. https://t.co/hVcTx7M6md

— Wetterschneider (@Stretchedwiener) July 23, 2025

"The graph was indicating that people were less likely to, if they got what they wanted [from an AI summary], they were less likely to click through [to the website the AI summary sourced it's information from], even if the link was there," he told The Cool Down. 

Google's AI Overviews were rolled out in May 2024 and have become more ubiquitous over the past year. The AI-generated answers are suspected of slashing traffic to many websites, which often serve as a source of income for their owners, including law firms, retail stores, and news organizations. 

Should we be creating robots that act like living beings? No way 🙅 Only for certain uses 🤖 I'm not sure 🤷 Totally 💯 Click your choice to see results and speak your mind.

"If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current form, it's going to have a devastating impact on the internet," Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and research at the marketing agency Amsive, told BBC News. "It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivise content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more."

If websites can no longer survive with AI Overviews stealing their traffic, it could negatively affect the up-to-dateness and accuracy of AI Overviews, since these summaries rely on sites like Wetterschneider's for information.

The Guardian reported that Authoritas, an analytics company, found that sites that were previously ranked first in Google search results could lose as much as 79% of their traffic because of AI Overviews.

Wetterschneider did not reach out to Google to confirm that his website had been scraped for AI summaries without his permission.

However, when Googling questions related to the topics Wetterschneider covers, such as "Does my designer toy need safety testing?," The Cool Down confirmed that the AI summary credits Shinbone Creative as a top source for the answer. 

Google has not responded to The Cool Down's request for comment as of reporting. It is not illegal for Google to scrape public sites for information without permission for its AI summaries, especially when Google lists the site as a source rather than copying it verbatim.

As a mild form of recourse, Wetterschneider has publicly condemned Google on X, receiving sympathy and commiseration from others who have faced the same troubles. 

"My website had always been a helpful resource to answer questions about toy making," he wrote on X. "The interested individuals would read a few Q and A's and often email me and I could work with them to make toys. Now all that is gone."

Thank you Jeff, for solving the mystery of why people interested in making toys no longer visit my website.

It was a puzzle why, recently, traffic fell to zero - since my website had always been a helpful resource to answer questions about toy making.

The interested individuals… https://t.co/pCbphr0ccw

— Wetterschneider (@Stretchedwiener) November 19, 2025

Wetterschneider's story is just one of the dark sides to AI's rapid expansion.

As AI continues to advance and grow in popularity, models require massive amounts of energy and water to function. 

"One query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes," researcher Jesse Dodge told NPR in 2024. "So, you can imagine with millions of people using something like that every day, that adds up to a really large amount of electricity."

As explained in a November U.N. Environment Program report, the massive amounts of electricity AI servers require to operate produce significant amounts of pollution, which has accelerated the overheating of our planet. 

In Google's 2024 sustainability report, the tech company noted that its gas pollution had risen by 48% since 2019, primarily attributing the significant increase to the energy needed to run AI. 

"As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging," the Google report states. 

AI servers also generate a lot of heat as they run, and they require a lot of water to stay cool. It's estimated that a medium-sized data center can use up to 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling, while larger data centers can use up to 5 million gallons per day. 

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, working with the Washington Post, estimated that composing a 100-word email with AI requires 519 milliliters (17.5 ounces) of water — roughly the size of an average single-use plastic water bottle. 

Even though researchers have raised many concerns about the rise of AI, both on the planet and on businesses and the people who run them, Wetterschneider says he isn't hopeful things will change for the better anytime soon. 

"I don't have some sort of fantasy of, like, 'Man, I wish they would [delete Gemini]," he said. "They're just going to take all of that work, all of these people, just decades of work, and then they're just going to own it all."

Wetterschneider told The Cool Down that, thankfully, the decrease in traffic to his website has not hit him too hard financially, thanks to the close relationships he's maintained with past clients. 

Still, he says he wants to use his platform to speak out against AI to inform the public of the severe downsides of the burgeoning technology. 

"We're all trying to adapt," he said. "Ultimately, at the end of the day, the things I do cannot be done — even badly — by AI."

Get TCD's free newsletters for easy tips to save more, waste less, and make smarter choices — and earn up to $5,000 toward clean upgrades in TCD's exclusive Rewards Club.