Which makes it all the weirder that they seem to be intentionally sabotaging it by nerfing Search into unusability.
Eventually they will break the "trust thermocline" in their search results and that will blow it up but on the way they'll keep making more and more money from every damaging change they make.
Why? The websites we visit can still be infested with google's ads, and so can our gmail accounts, and so can the youtube videos we watch, and they can push ads directly onto our cell phones 24/7. Google has plenty of ways to force ads into your life.
Google used to need search in order to build extensive dossiers on everyone. It told them what people were looking for online. What they were interested in. Now Google has their cell phones, their browser, and their DNS servers doing that for them. Most people are handing all of their browsing history to Google. Google doesn't need search, which is why it's been allowed to atrophy into uselessness.
Now if AI turns out to be the next big thing, they can steer differently next time, sell subscriptions, and avoid all that entanglement with multi-sided markets and layered revenue strategies. At least that’s my take.