> Google has been announcing quarter after quarter of record revenues and profits and hasn’t seen any decrease in search traffic.
this kind of things may take some time to spread across population
Given the audience here vs the general population, I can't help but wonder if it's just the alternate search engines like DuckDuckGo/Kagi/Bing that are losing search traffic. From the population sizes even the alternate ones that are Google-based might just not be enough to be visible in Google's numbers.
AI answers is good enough and there is a long history of companies who couldn’t monetize traffic via ads. The canonical example is Yahoo. Yahoo was one of the most traffic sites for 20 years and couldn’t monetize.
2nd issue: defaults matter. Google is the default search engine for Android devices, iOS devices and Macs whether users are using Safari or Chrome. It’s hard to get people to switch
3rd issue: any money that OpenAI makes off search ads, I’m sure Microsoft is going to want there cut. ChatGPT uses Bing
4th issue: OpenAIs costs are a lot higher than Google and they probably won’t be able to command a premium in ads. Google has its own search engine, its own servers, its own “GPUs” [sic],
5th: see #4. It costs OpenAI a lot more per ChatGPT request to serve a result than it costs Google. LLM search has a higher marginal cost.