The Death Knell of Digital Search

Google's traditional search business is in crisis as its AI features prioritize generating answers over directing users to external websites, undermining the ad-based revenue model that accounts for over half the company's income. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are capturing significant search traffic—handling one-fifth of Google's query volume—as users increasingly rely on these apps as their primary internet gateway, leaving Google's own AI products like Gemini struggling to compete.