> As someone who regularly reads things online, then wants to read them again like 3 years later, Google has been monotonically declining in quality.

I generally agree, but I think AI mode actually improved things somewhat compared to how things were just prior to it existing.

And I'm not saying what we have now is better than Golden Age Google, but things were just getting worse and worse for almost a decade. AI didn't fix the decade worth of decline, but it is the first thing I've seen from Google that at least partially reversed it for my own usage.