> For example Google is in the amazing position that it's search can become a commodity that prints a modest amount of money forever as the default search engine for LLM queries, while at the same time their flagship product can be a search AI that uses those queries as citations for answers people look for.
Search is not a commodity. Search providers other than Google are only marginally used because Google is so dominant. At the same time, when LLMs companies can start providing a better solution to the actual job of finding answers to user queries, then Google's dominance is disrupted and their future business is no longer guaranteed. Maintaining Google search infra to serve as a search backbone is not big enough for Google.