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Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah - exactly this. And yet people still say they've lost the AI race because Gemini 3.5 Pro or whatever has not been released yet... And here we are with fast and decent AI being served to and used by billions of people (most without them probably even realising), making ever-increasing revenue, gaining back market share etc. Who cares if their coding models are not as good as opus 5.5 when they're printing more and more money every quarter.

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Gemini is easily the single most popular LLM family used in the world, period.

As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.

This is not a “gotcha” kind of argumentative question, I am genuinely asking curiously: is the AI overview and AI lens thing really making Google lots of money?

I don't think directly, but search as a business category was once a solved domain with a single winner, and suddenly it was up for grabs again with LLMs. If Google ever lost search, they would lose Ads which is their entire core business. Google 'won' in the sense that they successfully integrated AI into search fast enough and well enough that they will (likely) hold their place through this transition, and can still funnel ads to users which is already integrated into their AI overview.

I can totally see that argument, and honestly agree with it, but I dunno if I misread what the person I replied to said, but that didn’t seem like what they meant to me!

It's true that Google is still very successful, but simply calling their AI a successful product misses the full picture. Their flagship product has always been and continues to be advertising, the AI overview is only there to pull people away from ChatGPT and, similar to ChatGPT itself, is not a product the vast majority of people would be interested in paying for - it exists only as a sort of loss leader to keep people looking at ads, and is not making any sort of profit on its own (quite the contrary, I imagine it's pretty expensive to run every query through an LLM, even if it's a small one.)

AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.

You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.

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