Google Search Is Already in Decline
Christopher Mims, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):
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 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.
The accompanying chart (“Estimated share of U.S. search advertising revenue”) suggests Google’s decline has been Amazon’s gain. Basically, Google may still dominate the market for general web search, but people more and more are searching using apps and services that aren’t (or aren’t only) general web search engines. And the reason why is that Google web search has gotten worse.
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Christopher Mims, writing for The Wall Street Journal (News+):
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 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.
The accompanying chart (“Estimated share of U.S. search advertising revenue”) suggests Google’s decline has been Amazon’s gain. Basically, Google may still dominate the market for general web search, but people more and more are searching using apps and services that aren’t (or aren’t only) general web search engines. And the reason why is that Google web search has gotten worse.
