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For the first time in a decade, Google Search flinched.
Its market share, which has been above 90% for ten years, slipped under 90%, for months in a row now.
That’s a big deal.
First but less importantly, when your business is the internet, losing even 1% means tens of millions of people didn’t Google something.
More importantly, that means the future isn’t looking so bright.
It gets better… or worse for them.
On May 7, 2025, Apple announced it’s exploring its own AI-powered search engine. Translation: They are looking to buy into AI search.
Apple announced it, Google’s stock lost $150 billion in value overnight.
Business as usual, right?
How Did We Get Here?
In 2015, Google hit that mythical 90% mark.
Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, they’re all fighting over scraps. Most people didn’t even realize there were other options.
Monopolies get lazy.
When you’ve got no competition, you stop trying to be good, you just try to make more money.
And Google did a lot wrong. SEO made articles long, unreadable crap on the first results pages. Ads fill every corner of the web. And answers are just too hard to find.
So why didn’t people just… stop using Google?
Because we’re all lazy creatures of habit. AND because Google paid billions to stay the default. They spent $20 billion a year just to remain the search engine on your iPhone.
And they know most people never changed their default search engine. They don’t even know what that means.
The U.S. Department of Justice noticed, too. They’ve been calling Google an illegal monopoly for years now.
Didn’t do much. Until now.
Enter AI
What’s really changing now is AI. Of course.
When ChatGPT launched its own search feature, people could ask questions and get actual answers.
Not 4 sponsored links, 6 SEO-optimized blog posts about the meaning of life, and one Reddit thread from 2012. Real answers.
Sure, they might be wrong. But the search results may just as well.
People love getting direct answers.
Traffic from AI search sources has exploded in just a few months. People use AI to find basically all the things we used to mindlessly Google.
And AI can understand you.
ChatGPT won’t just dump generic results, it’ll get the context, ask clarifying questions, and actually help you troubleshoot if it can.
Traditional search can’t do that.
Google knows this, of course. They started handing out AI generated answers via Gemini as well.
In fact, Google invented the modern AI boom. Back in 2017, their researchers wrote the seminal paper, Attention Is All You Need. Basically Gen AI 101.
So how did they let Google Search slip?
Google may have buried its own AI advantage in favor of selling more ads. The best minds behind that breakthrough left to start OpenAI and other startups.
Search Money
Search ads used to be the easiest money machine. Type, click, pay, profit.
But now AI answers your question before you even see the ad. No click. No impression. No $20 CPC.
Generative AI closes the gap between question and answer
No gap = nothing to interrupt with an ad
No interruption = no easy PPC billions
Google’s own AI Overviews are destroying its ad game. Give people a tidy answer up top, lose the click below.
Users love it. Advertisers hate it.
We’re not going back to 10 blue links. We’re not going back to paying $8 per click for “best hiking boots.”
The future is: Brands who are the answer, not the ad
The Bottom Line
So, is Google going to die? No.
They’re still the default for billions of searches daily. And they keep coming at us with AI solutions. Some are better than ChatGPT’s or Claude’s.
But they’re vulnerable now.
And if just enough people get convinced (by Apple or Microsoft or other tech giants via new AI search engines, company fusions, or buyouts, and other features) to switch away from Google Search, they might be in trouble more than we could imagine.
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Interesting but a drop of 1% is not exactly being disrupted yet. This space will have to be watched for a little longer before we can draw any conclusions
Gemini is pretty damn good I must admit