Will Robinson's Newsletter

04/22/2026

AI is not a side story anymore – it’s becoming core infrastructure.

The pace of research, the expansion of capabilities, the way it’s reshaping how people find information, make decisions, and engage with the world – that’s real progress. Used well, AI can accelerate learning, expand access, and surface information faster than any system we’ve had before. It can make local voices louder, help small organizations compete, and give people tools that used to only exist inside large institutions.

But that same shift is creating a new vulnerability that too many people are still underestimating.

We’re watching a fundamental change in how people find and trust information – and it’s not small.

For years, search meant platforms like Google. You typed a query, got a list of links, and decided what to trust. It was imperfect, but the user still had agency. You could compare sources, click around, and see the messiness of information in real time.

AI changes that. Both in terms of stand alone chat bot answers, but also web search engines like Google increasingly pushing “AI answers” into search results itself. New data from Advanced Web Ranking found that Google’s “AI Overviews” now appear in 59.7% of all search results, a trend that is only growing quickly.

AI doesn’t just point you to information- it interprets it for you. It pulls from what it can find, compresses it, synthesizes it, and delivers it back as a clean, coherent answer.

That’s a completely different dynamic.