(This piece is cross-posted from Signal360, where it first appeared)
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
If you work in marketing, Hemingway’s famous passage about bankruptcy will likely resonate. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 prompted dire predictions that search’s role as a reliable driver of traffic and sales was coming to a close. For the past three years, however, those predictions seemed overwrought. Despite a slight dip in January, which proved temporary, Google has maintained a steady grip on 90 percent of search activity, and continues to direct a firehose of leads and commerce across the web.
But rather suddenly — in the past two months, in fact — it seems everything has changed. Google announced and immediately shipped “AI Mode,” its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company had already implemented “AI Overviews” in 2024, essentially an evolution to its “One Box” feature that provides AI summaries for queries above Google’s familiar list of blue links. According to one study, those summaries are already responsible for a nearly 35 percent decline in outbound clicks — the lifeblood of traditional search engine marketing.
Google knows the question is no longer if AI is replacing search, but rather…
