The rise of content-generating platforms like ChatGPT and social media challenges Google’s dominance as the primary information access point. These platforms, unlike Google, continually create and evolve new content, potentially leading to a shift in how users seek information. While Google’s advertising revenue remains significant, the emergence of AI-driven services suggests a changing landscape for information retrieval.
The invention of search engines in the 1990s revolutionised the internet as we know it. Prior to this, users (and yes, I was one) had to use Ed Krol’s iconic “Whole Internet Catalogue” or single-use services such as Usenet or BBS systems.
The birth of search engines (Yahoo: 1994, Google: 1998) essentially created an online version of these catalogues and BBS, allowing users a single portal-like entrance to the web.
For other forms of information, such as news and specialised knowledge, the emergence of news sites and aggregators, plus the founding of Wikipedia, transformed old-printed media into conveniently accessible information.
Google monetised search beautifully, and today it is a monopoly. However, the world has changed: Folks enter their internet world via Insta, TikTok, Facebook, ChatGPT, X, BlueSky, WhatsApp, etc. – and there is a key difference to these services that will likely cause Google to lose the mantle of king. And that is content generation.
Google crawls pre-published content, whilst these new upstarts are both publisher and creator platforms. Google is information-limited, as knowledge is defined by those that created content elsewhere and then permit Google to read it. The other platforms continually create and evolve new content.
This is especially the case with LLMs, where they learn (aka: read & digest) not only everything on the static internet but all the interactions and output created from them. Often referred to as “synthetic content”, LLMs such as ChatGPT gain exponentially more data the larger they get.
ChatGPT, for example, can get to all the information that Google has, can be conversationally accessed, and creates output in the style and format the users want. So why would you still use Google with all the invasive last-decade monetisation? I don’t. I use ChatGPT … and Wikipedia plus a few other niche platforms. I might use Google as a shortcut to those platforms, but I’m not using Google Search in the way they want it.
Admittedly, there is a skill to LLMs and a cost, as at the purest level it is a bit nerdy. But with the roll-out of integrated AI services such as Apple Intelligence, we’ll see that change. It will be simpler and more natural. It may even foretell the demise of the browser – but that’s for another day.
So where does that leave Google’s $175bn search advertising revenue juggernaut? It’s not going to zero, quite clearly, and Google is committing to investing $100bn+ in the race to monetise AI.
But Google Search is dead. Long live whatever follows it and pray it has an option to pay to opt out of invasive advertising. Yay!
