Comment by ethbr1
9 hours ago
Google hasn't seen its legacy ad revenue start to dent until products with built-in agents start to see mass adoption.
Writing is on the wall that orders of magnitude fewer people will be going to google.com or using an interactive Google search in the next 5 years though.
LLMs are pretty mediocre for a lot of money queries like searching to buy shoes, looking at flights etc due to them not being up to date. So sure you can use them as a wrapper on top of Google but I assume a huge chunk of people will just go to Google to do that or use Google agents. Chrome will prove a very valuable asset for that - the whole experience can become agentic and Google is very well positioend to convert billions of users into their AI. Power of habit and also Google will deliver a very high quality experience at scale that only OpenAI can currently compete with. I'm not saying their search / ads revenue is never gonna drop - it might. But it will be a slow process (as we can see. it's actually still freaking growing in the high tens) and Google is well positioned to recover the lost revenue with its A.I offerings.
LLMs can execute searches? You can absolutely send ChatGPT to look for a cheap flight and it will do pretty well. And because I am paying for ChatGPT rather than the advertiser's, I am the customer and not the product.
You may pay to ChatGPT, but sooner or later you will become their product too. All the conversations you had or will have will be turned into signals to match you with products from advertisers, maybe not directly in the conversation with them, but anywhere else. It's not a mater of if, but looking at the pace things are going, and how financially pressured openai is, it's only a matter of time that their conversations with them will be turned into profit in some way or another, they basically have no choice financially.
> Writing is on the wall that orders of magnitude fewer people will be going to [product] or using [product] in the next 5 years though.
counterpoint: which service or product is immune to this statement?