Googling is for old people. That’s a problem for Google.
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. If Google were a ship, it would be the Titanic in the hours before it struck an iceberg—riding high, supposedly unsinkable, and about to encounter a force of nature that could make its name synonymous with catastrophe. The trends moving against Google are so numerous and interrelated that the Justice Department’s attempt to dismantle the company—the specifics of which were unveiled Nov.
20—could be the least of its problems. 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.
In responding to government antitrust inquiries, Google itself makes this point often: “Evidence at trial shows we face fierce competition from a broad range of competitors." This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S.
. Read more on livemint.com
