Will the GenAI Trojan horse take Google’s search fortress apart?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I have written a lot on this before, but with recent moves by all the Big Tech players, it bears repetition: Every artificial intelligence (AI) company is making a frontal attack on the impregnable-so-far fort that Google has created with search. The emperor’s defeat, however, will come not from outside, but within.

The market for search is worth $200 billion, expected to grow at 10% every year to $400 billion in 2035, with a fat 60% gross margin. 90% of this is owned by one player, Google, which guards it as jealously as its very own Kohinoor. For decades, enemies and competitors have fruitlessly pounded its thick walls.

Microsoft has been trying for decades now, but has only about a 4% share to show for it, though even with this thin sliver, it is a $12.6 billion business for it. Yahoo had battered its search head against the same walls years ago, only to ignominiously retreat from the battlefield. So did smaller, nimbler players—the intellectual Wolfram Alpha, the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo and an ad-free Neeva, which created a minor stir but was smothered by its much larger competitor.

Google, meanwhile, continues to dominate. Its latest quarterly earnings reveal 12% search revenue growth to $88.3 billion. It is still the clear leader, with the best and fastest results.

It is a veritable synonym for search, a verb for many, and its use of AI to hone search results keeps getting better every year. However, perhaps for the first time, its citadel does not appear as formidable as it once did. Competitors continue to snap at its heels, and this time they have a new weapon in their arsenal—Generative AI.