However the judge is still out in regards to how much can AI allow Google to squeeze the profit margins of businesses by offering even better conversion rates. Personally, I don't think it will make a big difference, the AI will not make you buy more. I suspect Google makes more money by having multiple companies fight for the same customer than actually making a conversion.
IMO best case scenario for Google is to keep their search market. Table stakes is keeping search relevant at all.
The inverse is true - people continue using Google products despite being aware that they are spying on them. Doing it outright won't make them suddenly start caring.
It’s what the whole house of cards is built on.
Also for queries asking for product recommendation, where ad price is quite high, they could still plug ads into an LLM and have it write a summary back to you similar to what magazines do with sponsored content.
Main part of Google's business is selling infrastructure for that SEO junk, AdWords et al. Sure, you meant the _other_ SEO junk, but from AI point of view both would be noise to be separated from actual content.
Oh, you optimist!
It's ALWAYS about incentives. Aka money.
Companies will use AI to squeeze garbage (aka ads) in every nook and cranny of the observable universe now. Think of all the thankless tasks that required a human to do them until now.
Guess what? Now that AI can do them 100000x faster and probably 2-5x better.
Our lives are about to be flooded by a stream of -pardon my French-, adshit.
In the context of this thread, I don't think Google could sell more ads with an LLM which is why they sat on this technology. It disrupts their current business, while being more expensive and harder to monetize (charging a subscription to consumer is worse than a monopolized ad business charging hundreds of millions to corporations).
100% Yes. We can (because people are going to ask how to do X in postgres and AI can reply how to do that in postgres with a side-note that this Sponsored product does it out of the box). however, can you sell more ads (by tagging them as "ads" or "Sponsored") - That is where the gray area shows up (IMO).
Obviously, this is still evolving but I guess something along that lines could be done, if one is too serious to monetize it. In my personal opinion, I think right now companies are focussed around capturing market than monetization.
Google has maximized their ad revenue with their current model. You don't have the same ad real estate in your example and that is a problem. Now they get money for impressions on a whole page, and clicks from people trying to find the right fit among the seo. I believe that google wants information filtering but not too much as it needs current estate for ads.
Companies like Google and Meta have been relying on AI to display ads for years now. It’s been central to their strategy.
ChatGPT was just a shiny toy. A very cool, shiny toy, but a toy nonetheless.
OpenAI just implemented something (well) that was developed in other places.
LLMs are indeed very cool and maybe even revolutionary, but their main accomplishment was beating big tech to the punch.
I suspect that those who don't care about privacy or can't afford to pay, will be swarmed with AI-seo results from an ad-supported model, but people will FINALLLY have the choice to pay and avoid this ad-fest. And who knows, maybe when open-source catches up, it will even be affordable enough that ad-tech will shrink considerably.
Yep. Google didn’t want a chatbot telling kids how to cook meth, so they weren’t in a hurry to release. Meanwhile, releasing a chatbot is one of the few cards a much smaller company like OpenAI can play.
And in terms of ethics, the perception of them being a force for good eroded a lot. When thinking about the typical googler, people around here will sooner think about an exec trying to skip some tax than about a techie doing innovative stuff, because that's what their media coverage is about these days in Europe.
I'll give you that Microsoft is very unlikely to go away either, unless the US govt finally remembers they have antitrust laws.
Go ask 10 non-tech people what they think of Google.
Actually as a factoid, I recently changed jobs, and got handed an iphone for work. People noticed it and commented on it, whereas a pixel would probably have not raised much attention.
Makes one wonder if it's actually representative of the whole gen Z, or just some specific western subset.
Because online advertising, particularly search ads, are working less well for advertisers and regulators are pushing for more changes. The vast majority of Google revenue comes from an industry that is facing massive risks.
On top of that I don't think it's clear that "AI" in search will help Google sell advertising or increase revenue. It's also likely to bring them under even more scrutiny from regulators.
In many ways AI is harder to sell ads against, Google is payed when people leave the page via a click on an ad. That doesn't happen when Google is summarising the content. Microsoft/Bing have found a brilliant way to attack Google, build a product that they have to copy that (potentially) decimates ad revenue.
Didn't 0-click search as a trend for google search predate bing's changes?
Not really. The click rate is iirc usually around 5%; I'm not convinced this is much higher than the "noise floor" generated by a human equivalent of drunk racoons. So in practice Google is being paid for displays.
History would say otherwise.
Look at how quickly Nokia went south.
Look at how quickly Google took over from the AltaVista search engine.
On the other hand AltaVista was on the early days of the internet where everything was much more turbulent.
Hard to fund loss leaders like Android with say 20% less revenue.
But one thing that is obvious is that having 20% less revenue would not mean Google was unable to work on Android. We know that, because they were able to already fund Android in the distant past of 2021, when their revenue was 20% lower than now. (In fact, they were able to afford Android in 2010, with 90% lower revenue.)
What's the last time Google launched a product that everyone really uses?
Also Google Maps, Google Photos and Google Drive have more than 1B users.
[1]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-are-1b-ipho...
as for your link. iphones are popular, but it's definitely not true that "everyone" has an iphone, which is my point. android has almost 4 billion active users, for comparison.
It's hard for a software company to compete against the largest ad network ever created.