Which explains why they push an AI Summary to the top of most searches which discourages clicking on any of the search results.
Or not.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.