The final word about search
In a galaxy far, far away, there was a company which came out with a novel way to index the Internet. The founders were young and full of good intentions. Their motto was — Don’t be evil.
Before we knew it, this company sucked all the content from the Internet and search was provided as a free service. Not only that, the company provided another free service — it provided analytics about all the visitors to your websites. You knew who and when and what people were doing on your website. It helped you to optimize it to be found by more people to buy more of your services. It was somewhere between Utopia or an advanced state of communism. Google, a company to love and admire.
This was the unspoken contract between Google and the owners of all these websites: We provide you with content, you give us the analytics, we try to improve the content and you will deliver more eyeballs.
What was there for Google?
Showing ads next to your search query. It was almost like the separation between the editorial and ads in newspaper business.
While giving away things for free, Google became a double monopoly (Monopoly 1 and Monopoly 2) and became for many websites and organizations the main if not only marketing channel.
But you know what happens when you make your first billion dollars? You want to make your second and third and why not go for $100 billion? In order to do that you need to optimize your revenue stream. That happens only when people are seeing your ads and that happens only when people spend more time on your website. Yes, that website which delivered sub-seconds results with thousands of links for you to discover.
In the name of better user experience, why don’t we show a quick summary of news articles, so you don’t have to click on the link and read the whole article yourself? How convenient. Convenient for the user, profitable for Google and a nightmare for the publishing industry. You can blame the news industry for building their own demise when they published the first news story online and for free. #badstrategy
For the rest, life became tougher and tougher. Big companies were able to outspend smaller rivals both on the ads and the content optimization. A whole cottage industry sprung up and promised that they are the only one who could reverse-engineer Google’s ranking algorithm and get you on the coveted first page.
And then came OpenAI with ChatGPT. Using human language, it convinced people with an authoritative voice that it can provide an answer to any question and not just any answer, it was able to discuss the topic. And it understood you so well, it even complimented you how smart you are. This was the first step in separating us from the original source of information. ChatGPT became the arbiter of truth.
Strangely, Google, a double monopoly, thought that it had to compete with OpenAI, especially when OpenAI integrated its ChatGPT with Microsoft’s Bing. Whatever.
Google added its Gemini to the search results. Real result? A convoluted search experience that made it difficult to trace the source of the original content. Ads are still displayed, but the traffic to the website with the content used to provide the answer? Plummeted.
Welcome to May, 2026. During the Google I/O conference, the new ‘intelligent search box’ was announced. No more pesky links, no more list of results. It will be an interactive experience where Google will gather information on your behalf and its AI algorithms will provide the answer. The list of amazing features is long and enticing.
What is the problem with this latest innovation coming from Google?
One thing Google learned from observing OpenAI ChatGPT that users provided far more information about themselves, far richer context. Why is that important? You get the chance to provide better ads and with the right answer, you can encourage people to click on even more ads. And who has a better infrastructure for serving ads? Google or OpenAI?
What Google did to the newspaper industry, it is now going to do to the whole Internet. It broke the original promise — you give me your content, I give you traffic. And because it is a monopoly, Google doesn’t care. People are used to going to the Google home page to search. Now they will get answers. To many the disappearance of links and replacement with conversation will be a welcome change. Since it is free, who cares.
The money printing colossus will keep printing money for years to come, but the strategy is flawed. The disappearance of links from Google results and the disappearance of traffic will remove any incentive for content producers and website owners to keep any Google service around. Why would I optimize my content for a marketing channel which is no longer channeling? Why should I allow any bot or crawler to ever visit my website? What do I get in return? From Google (and any other AI company) — nothing.
What seems like innovation on Google’s part is cutting the hand which was feeding its marketing engine.
The recurrent pattern? Companies come and go. Big ones, small ones. Despite its size, despite its monopoly, Google is vulnerable to disruption more than ever. It will come from the left side, unseen, dismissed at first. It will be its size and business model which will prevent Google from doing anything about it.