GOOGLE DESERVES ITS PROBLEMS: Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.
The company’s core business is under siege. People are increasingly getting answers from artificial intelligence. Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information. And the quality of the results delivered by its search engine is deteriorating as the web is flooded with AI-generated content. Taken together, these forces could lead to long-term decline in Google search traffic, and the outsize profits generated from it, which prop up its parent company Alphabet’s GOOGL -0.17%decrease; red down pointing triangle money-losing bets on things like its Waymo self-driving unit.
The first danger facing Google is clear and present: When people want to search for information or go shopping on the internet, they are shifting to Google’s competitors, and advertising dollars are following them. In 2025, eMarketer projects, Google’s share of the U.S. search-advertising market will fall below 50% for the first time since the company began tracking it.
In responding to government antitrust inquiries, Google itself makes this point often: “Evidence at trial shows we face fierce competition from a broad range of competitors.”
This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day.
The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Apple integrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.
The biggest problem is that Google doesn’t return good results anymore. Even similar services like Bing are better. AI tools are useful because when the significant results don’t appear on the first page, AI can read all 700 — or 7000 — pages of results to find them. Some of this is AI content, continuing what SEO did to skew Google results. Some of it — a lot, despite its low profile in this article — is Google futzing with its own results for its own purposes, both commercial and political. And many users lost faith in Google due to its deranking and demonetizing of right-leaning sources over “misinformation” that generally turned out to be true.
UPDATE: Non-paywalled version here.