Comment by sublimefire

I bet the core of the problem for Google is that more folks use programmatic access to search which is not great on their side. Naturally you end up using Serp or other similar search APIs as they are great for the job. I believe this is also an issue especially in cases where search is performed on behalf of the user (scripts, ai tools). Google is just losing ground here, why would they bother otherwise, think what will happen to their stock if the search usage will drop? Another thing is that this builds pressure to whoever is integrating such a search tool in their products, clearly Google wants to grab that market as well.