The Crazy Idea That Might Save Google Search

[Second in a series, first post here]

This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing an anti-trust case — that happened last summer. Nor was it the first ten days of Google’s ongoing search remedies trial. Instead, it was a statement just two days ago by an Apple executive, Eddie Cue, which led to an almost instantaneous panic amongst investors.

Cue told the court that consumers’ preference for using AI agents had led to a decline in search traffic inside Apple’s Safari browser (Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to secure that traffic — a major focal point of the government’s case).

Cue then twisted the knife: A decline in search traffic, he said, “has never happened in 22 years.”

A near perfect storm of “never happened” has settled over Google this past year: Twin rulings labeling the company a monopolist, a 10 percent annual decline in its stock compared to a 10 percent increase in the NASDAQ index, and the rise of generative AI as a replacement for search, the first significant competitive threat to the company’s 25-year run as the dominant force in how humanity asked questions of the world.