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They only dominate Ads because they dominate search if everyone leaves Search the ad business grinds to a halt as well. These are the ying and yang of Google.

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Kind of. They dominate ads because the dominated search when they bought the successful ads company. By that point in time, they already had your profile built, and the further use of search just continues to enhance that profile. But now that ads has its own persistent tracking that dependence on search is not as strong as it used to be

People have reported a decrease in ROI from spending on Google ads already when they no longer control all the eyes and where you rank in what those eyes see when they search, that ROI will drop even more. People will stop paying for Google ads when the ROI is higher on other platforms.

Couple that with the fact that a lot of folks have moved their search to GPT or Claude once those platforms start taking in ad money... that budget will come from somewhere and that's likely existing Google ad buy dollars shifting.

> when they bought the successful ads company

Could you elaborate on this? What ad company did Google buy?

DoubleClick (2008, according to Wikipedia)

doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.

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