I think I shouldn’t be so melodramatic about Google’s future. I probably meant that its SE business is about to get shredded. I suspect that that is part of GOOG’s business plan to increase revenue from other sources to cover the expected shortfall in advertising.
“In 2023, Google generated $307.39 billion, comprising $175B in Google Search, $31.51B in YouTube ads, and $31.31B in Google network revenue. $34.69B in other revenue, $33B in Google cloud, $1.53B in other …” IOW, 2/3rds of Google’s revenue is ad/search related.
Much of that is either generated via Google search ad placements, or the result of traffic that goes from Search to the vendor’s site that displays google ads. Sudden weakness in search results would directly impact the bottom line.
It may also be the reason that GOOG is trying to ‘buy revenue’ through its impending purchase of Hubspot. Of course, we all remember what happened when Microsoft bought Nokia to get into the hardware business for phones. Do you think that Google can avoid that?
So like I said: If AI upends content creation, user retention and search engine placement… I think we’re going to see some major disruption. AI is already generating content and siphoning off traffic that would otherwise have gone to Google SE.
Google’s own admission that SE results are weakening (and my own experience) with the increasing amount of generated content. There hasn’t been an obvious impact on Google’s financial performance. Yet.