I think they make most of their money off searches with intent (“vehicle detailing near me”) and things for which they still send you somewhere. The kind of searches that an LLM can just answer probably largely just sent you to Wikipedia or somewhere nobody was paying much for anyway.

It’s possible AI will do a better job of capturing ad dollars by better serving intentional searchers.

I hate the china fear mongering. It's like the 50s red scare but 10x dumber since by all realistic accounts china is just. another government. a scary one and powerful one, yes, but so is the us. They aren't a rogue state like the DPRK or Iran, aren't funding terrorism by any realistic, and realise that starting any wars is a very bad idea