Das langsame Ende der Suchmaschine und des freien Internets
Casey Newton schreibt:
Rand Fishkin, an expert in search engine optimization and founder of the audience research company SparkToro, published a report last month that sought to put the rise of AI search in context against Google’s continued dominance. It found that Google searches rose 21.64 percent from 2023 to 2024. As Fishkin notes, this seems to be consistent with what Google CEO Sundar Pichai said when the company rolled out its AI overviews last year: that people who see them tend to do more searches.
Multiple analyses have now found that Google’s AI overviews have resulted in declines of 70 to 80 percent in the click-through rates to the web pages from which they derive their information. That’s 70 to 80 percent fewer visits to web pages, and one of the primary web page-producing industries is shrinking accordingly: CNN, Vox Media, HuffPost, and NBC are among the publishers that have announced layoffs in 2025 so far.
For the moment, Google’s AI overviews seem to have quelled the possibility of a sudden mass defection away from its core search engine. But it’s now clear that for the first time in decades, a generation is growing up with the possibility of using something other than Google as its default search. Today, they’re using ChatGPT to do all their homework assignments. By the time they graduate, they may be using it to do almost everything else.
Google knows this, which is why it is seeking to pre-install Gemini on smartphones wherever it can. The company is having some success; Gemini is the second-most used chatbot after ChatGPT, according to Fishkin’s analysis, and Google overall handles 373 times as many searches as OpenAI’s bot.
Bit by bit, current and future generations are shifting their habits away from traditional search and toward chatbots. Google can spend its many remaining billions of dollars on implementing Plan B. But it remains unclear what anyone else is supposed to do.