This is such a basic take that totally misses the bigger picture of why Google made this move.

Google was forced to do this and it's a miracle of their slow organizational gears that they took so long to do it. So many people have already transitioned to using ChatGPT as a replacement for Google. All of this is driven by consumer behavior and the desire to "just get an answer" rather than having to wade through all the sources and try to figure out what is SEO slop vs what is actual reputable information. Google SERP results have been gamed by SEO slop for economically valuable search terms long before the rise of AI. ChatGPT simply solved a huge problem waiting for a solution.

From the web content creator's POV, there are to paths:

1. If you are merely a publisher and rely on eyeballs on ads to drive your own revenue, you are screwed. AI is going to ignore all the ads and only extract the content.

2. If however you are serving helpful information out of the goodness of your heart or if the content itself references a product or service which from which you will derive economic benefit from, you are still good.

I don't see this as a bad thing. Ads on websites were a necessary evil and will be seen as a relic of the first 30 years of the internet. Ads will not go away but they will just migrate to the application layer (youTube, LLM interfaces etc) that will provide a much more targeted experience. There will be winners and losers from this transition but that's normal and healthy.