With the rise of the internet came the need to find information more quickly. The concept of search engines came into this space to fill this need, with a relatively basic initial design.
This is the basis of the giant megacorp Google, whose claim to fame was they made the best one of these. Into this stack they inject ads, both ads inside the sites themselves and then turning the search results themselves into ads.
As time went on, what we understood to be "Google search" was actually a pretty sophisticated machine that effectively determined what websites lived or died. It was the only portal that niche websites had to get traffic. Google had the only userbase large enough for a website dedicated to retro gaming or VR headsets or whatever to get enough clicks to pay their bills.
Despite the complexity, the basic premise remained. Google steers traffic towards your site, the user gets the answer from your site and then everyone is happy. Google showed some ads, you showed some ads, everyone showed everyone on Earth ads.
This incredibly lucrative setup was not enough, however, to drive endless continous growth, which is now the new expectation of all tech companies. It is not enough to be fabulously profitable, you must become Weyland-Yutani. So now Google is going to break this long-standing agreement with the internet and move everything we understand to be "internet search" inside their silo.
Zero-Click Results
In March 2024 Google moved to embed LLM answers in their search results (source). The AI Overview takes the first 100 results from your search query, combines their answers and then returns what it thinks is the best answer. As expected, websites across the internet saw a drop in traffic from Google. You started to see a flood of smaller websites launch panic membership programs, sell off their sites, etc.
It became clear that Google has decided to abandon the previous concept of how internet search worked, likely in the face of what it considers to be an existential threat from OpenAI. Maybe the plan was always to bring the entire search process in-house, maybe not, but OpenAI and its rise to fame seems to have forced Google's hand in this space.
This is not a new thing, Google has been moving in this direction for years. It was a trend people noticed going back to 2019.
It appears the future of Google Search is going to be a closed loop that looks like the following:
- Google LLM takes the information from the results it has already ingested to respond to most questions.
- Companies will at some point pay for their product or service to be "the answer" in different categories. Maybe this gets disclosed, maybe not, maybe there's just a little i in the corner that says "these answers may be influenced by marketing partners" or something.
- Google will attempt to reassure strategic partners that they aren't going to kill them, while at the same time turning to their relationship with Reddit to supply their "new data".
This is all backed up by data from outside the Google ecosystem confirming that the ratio of scrapes to click is going up. Basically it's costing more for these services to make their content available to LLMs and they're getting less traffic from them.
This new global strategy makes sense, especially in the context of the frequent Google layoffs. Previously it made strategic sense to hold onto all the talent they could, now it doesn't matter because the gates are closing. Even if you had all the ex-Google engineers money could buy, you can't make a better search engine because the concept is obsolete. Google has taken everything they need from the internet, it no longer requires the cooperation or goodwill of the people who produce that content.
What happens next?
So the source of traffic for the internet is going to go away. My guess is there will be some effort to prevent this, some sort of alternative Google search either embraced or pushed by people. This is going to fail, because Google is an unregulated monopoly. Effectively because the US government is so bad at regulating companies and so corrupt with legalized bribery in the form of lobbying, you couldn't stop Google at this point even if you wanted to.
- Android is the dominant mobile platform on Earth
- Chrome is the dominant web browser
- Apple gets paid to make the other mobile platform default to Google
- Firefox gets paid to make the other web browser default to Google
While the US Department of Justice has finally decided to doing something, it's almost too late to make a difference. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google
Even if you wanted to and had a lot of money to throw at the problem, it's too late. If Apple made their own search engine and pointed iOS to it as the default and paid Firefox to make it the default, it still wouldn't matter. The AI Overview is a good enough answer for most questions and so convincing consumers to:
- switch platforms
- and go back to a two/three/four step process compared to a one step process is a waste of time.
I'm confident there will still be sites doing web searching, but I suspect given the explosion in AI generated slop it's going to be impossible to use them even if you wanted to. We're quickly reaching a point where it would be possible to generate a web page on demand, meaning the capacity of the slop-generation exceeds the capacity of humans to fight it.
Because we didn't regulate the internet, we're going to end up with an unbreakable monopoly on all human knowledge held by Microsoft and Google. Then because we didn't learn anything we're going to end up with a system that can produce false data on demand and make it impossible to fact check anything that the LLM companies return. Paid services like Kogi will be the only search engines worth trying.
Impact down the line
So I think you are going to see a rush of shutdowns and paywalls like you've never seen before. In some respects, it is going to be a return to the pre-Google internet, where it will once again be important that consumers know your domain name and go directly to your site. It's going to be a massive consolidation of the internet down and I think the ad-based economy of the modern web will collapse. Google was the ad broker, but now they're going to operate like Meta and keep the entire cycle inside their system.
My prediction is that this is going to basically destroy any small or medium sized business that attempts to survive with the model of "produce content, get paid per visitor through ads". Everything instead is going to get moved behind aggressive paywalls, blocking archive.org. You'll also see prices go way up for memberships. Access to raw, human produced information is going to be a premium product, not something for everyday people. Fake information will be free.
Anyone attempting to make an online store is gonna get mob-style shakedown. You can either pay Amazon to let consumers see your product or you can pay Google to have their LLM recommend your product or you can (eventually) pay OpenAI/Microsoft to do it. I also think these companies will use this opportunity to dramatically reprice their advertising offerings. I don't think it'll be cheap to get the AI Summary to recommend your frying pan.
I suspect there will be a brief spike in other forms of marketing spend, like podcasts, billboards, etc. When companies see the sticker shock from Google they're going to explore other avenues like social media spend, influencers, etc. But all those channels are going to be eaten by the LLM snake at the same time.
If consumers are willing to engage with an LLM-generated influencer, that'll be the direction companies go in because they'll be cheaper and more reliable. Podcast search results are gonna be flooded with LLM-generated shows and my guess is that they're going to take more of the market share than anyone wants to admit. Twitch streaming has already moved from seeing the person to seeing an anime-style virtual overlay where you don't see the persons face. There won't be a reason for an actual human to be involved in that process.
End Game
My prediction is that a lot of the places that employ technical people are going to disappear. FAANG isn't going to be hiring at anywhere near the same rate they were before, because they won't need to. I don't need 10,000 people maintaining relationships with ad sellers and ad buyers or any of the staff involved in the maintenance or improvement of those systems.
The internet is going to return to more of its original roots, which are niche fan websites you largely find through social media or word of mouth. These sites aren't going to be ad driven, they'll be membership driven. Very few of them are going to survive. Subscription fatigue is a real thing and the math of "it costs a lot of money to pay people to write high quality content" isn't going to go away.
In a relatively short period of time, it will go from "very difficult" to absolutely impossible to launch a new commercially viable website and have users organically discover that website. You'll have to block LLM scrapers and need a tremendous amount of money to get a new site bootstrapped. Welcome to the future, where asking a question costs $4.99 and you'll never be able to find out if the answer is right or not.