If I type in the name of a company so that I can navigate to their website, and I have to scroll past my whole viewport of other companies bidding to be placed above where I'm trying to go, I learn it's faster for me to just type the website address into the bar instead of going via Google.

They designed a UX that made my life easier and caused me to form a habit, and then broke that UX for money causing me to form a new habit.

It's just one example of dozens, but the consequence is that I see 95% fewer Google ads than I used to. My guess I am on the leading edge (along with many others on this forum) of a wave of change of user behavior that spells pessimism for Google search revenue.

Yes, to an extent. There were three unfavorable circumstances other than AI eating into search: FX (major), the World Cup timing, end of de minimis exemption in EU.

The real trick is that they're pretty much the only relevant ads on the entire internet. That and they pretty much force companies into paying so that people that search specifically for that company actually see that company as the first result.

[1]: As the page says,

- "Search" means "ads on Google Search and on other Google properties such as Gmail, Maps and Google Play"

- "Everything else" means "YouTube ads, subscriptions and devices, Google Network and Other Bets".

Everything else is “call for pricing” for all but the simplest use cases.

What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.

Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..

Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.

I'm not a believer in Google search long term, but advertisers continue to pay because they still get value - even if Google increases prices.

Second sentence is empirically a complete lie.

Search volume is still growing, despite analysts asking on every call what Google is going to do about falling volume, and Google continuing to re-iterate: Search volume is still growing, as are clicks on ads.

I get it that everyone hates paying as much for clicks as they do now. You can hate it all you want. You can claim Google is lying about search volume and ads, but that would be massive securities fraud...

Haters gonna hate. It doesn't mean the king is dead.

im very far from dentistry

You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.

I think the bigger concern is that earnings misses are very rare for GOOG, and historically they've been able to hit almost any target that Wall Street expects. Their past earnings misses were all related to major macroeconomic events (2020Q1, which was the COVID shutdowns, 2022 all year with inflation from COVID/Ukraine + rate hikes, and 2019Q3 with the taper tantrum from Fed rate hikes), and most of them were more in the 5% range. A 30% miss, particularly with slowing revenue growth in their core business despite almost full monetization of commercial queries, could indicate that the golden goose is disintegrating.

For that matter, GOOG has been extremely correlated with macroeconomic indicators since about 2018, which means investors in the rest of the stock market should probably watch out. It's likely we're already in recession but don't know it.

The solution is to force ads upon you and hope that you accidentally click on one due to sensory overload. Or more ads.

We weren’t aware of this.

The ad company we used notified us of this issue and gave us three days to fix it. Afterwards our click-through rate went from something like 3% to .25%.

I thought it was just because they were forcing third tier Chinese knockoffs for everything I searched for. After a few months, I gave up completely. I now look for product reviews on YT, THEN go back to Amazon and search for exactly what I'm looking for. Even then? The search results are still jammed with cheap knockoffs.

But when an algorithm does it, they go "wow such future"

not really... search was great in 2008 or 2014, but not in 2022. seo spammers won by then, and their writing was even worse than opus 5.

I remember that the sites google shown before were sites you could get lost in. often they were communities. often they were sites actually written by an enthusiast of a subject.

these sites died. I wonder whether google was the victim or the culprit. the death of these sites did end up making their product worse. however, any site that actually hooked you meant less ad revenue for google. google wants you to come back from the result, since that's a second chance for you to click the ad. a result you come back from however is inherently a bad result.

Example search: video card game with the robot guy

AI overview [correct]: The video card game you are thinking of is likely Inscryption, which features a mysterious, robotic-looking or masked scrybe (like P03, the robot scrybe of technology)

I'm not really sure why you say that cloud compute isn't a moat. It's an enormous investment to compete there; there's a reason even large companies buy compute from GCP/Azure/AWS or even if they have their own compute don't attempt to compete. Additionally, GCP has been an enormously successful 'bet' for Google over the past decade.

Google has also turned subscription revenue for their various services into a major revenue stream; it'd be hard to call those various services (Google Drive, Google Play, etc.) anything other than successful.

Chrome doesn't generate revenue by itself, but it certainly drives advertising revenue across the rest of Google's portfolio and was developed in-house.

Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.

As a simple example, a week ago we had the GCP outage in UK, their status page said all was good.

This is what allow little SMEs to not have to suffer that piece of shit that Windows is. I know people running their SMEs (and I helped them set up Google Workspace) from Mac and Chromebooks since years and years and who do not ever want to here again from anything Microsoft.

They're basically doing everything inside "Google Workspace" (formerly "G Suite", formerly "Google apps for domain" because Google's product naming is just confusing).

Gemini is also IMO excellent for everything that is not coding. It's really rare that I use Anthropic models (which I pay a subscription for) for anything else than coding.

GMail / Drive / Google Docs / Google Spreadsheets are great for a shitload of SMEs out there who want to give Windows and Office the middle finger.

They used to have a second minimint in AdSense et. al. ("Display Advertising"), but that shrinks by the year economy-wide as the vicious cycle of data tracking, ad blocking, and paywall dodging continues. Now it's a mere $7B[1], compared to $11B for Youtube (technically also Display Advertising but it gets its own segment now, I guess) and $63B from the money printer proper.

[1] Actual report here: https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q... Interestingly, display revenues are slightly up! But still, in Google land, "slightly up" is potentially a scandalous failure. Perhaps they settled into better agreements with big publishers ("sell side") after it became clear that they wouldn't actually be punished for having a Display Ads monopoly, despite losing the antitrust case brought by Biden's DoJ.

:(

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/google-admits-ai-sea...

I’ve been saying for a while that AI is going to be a bigger problem for Google than many realize: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957708

The only revenue covered by Network is what it pays out to newspapers and other kinds of ad-supported websites.

It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.

Do they control the default Search engine for Android? For Chrome?

Did they pay to be the default Search engine on iPhone? On Firefox?

Are those rare resources? I'd say yes.

And you're conflating "illegally-maintained Monopoly" with "Monopoly." Whether they got there through using illegal tactics or not is a separate question from whether they are a Monopoly now. 90% - is that a high enough market share to qualify as a monopoly, when their annual revenue is like $224 billion? What percentage would be enough to convince you? Does it need to be 100%?

For example, non-regulatory attempts at blocking of competitors, which Google does engage in due to their dominant position in mobile (of course, that's also just another better product)

Also, of course, before anyone even realized the game was on at Google, Anthropic and OpenAI already downloaded the entirety of YouTube.