Just wait for “$1000/mo for a 10% chance your product is mentioned in the AI summary for an auto parts search”.

I don’t think the burden of proof for seeming reasonably likely is terribly high. That it sounds very much like something they’d do seems sufficient.

Google's search is increasingly AI driven (as it should be, i do not want to click on reddit links and waste my time skimming through the 1000 comment threads), asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like asking Tesla to come up with an ICE engine car right now. It is not happening.

Google Search I would expect will increasingly become more like Gemini and less like traditional search. Schools could certainly go to DuckDuckGo or other search engines that are free. (Google has shown that it does not care if they do as it sees it as a dying business.)

If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?

This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.

That's exactly why they MUST have everyone opted in, even if they don't like it.

It's a shame they will be siloed and get biased over time. I think AI labs will come up with ways to not-compete in certain areas too.

AI boosters have a vested interest in getting people to forget the distinction between primary and secondary sources because they want to elevate chatbot output to the same legitimacy as primary sources.

I have some guesses:

They can artificially inflate the number of users who use their AI by including everyone who uses their search engine.

It trains people to be increasingly dependent on whatever google tells them instead of checking through, reading multiple sources, and verifying information for themselves.

They hope to let people pay them to manipulate what AI returns for certain searches (either mentioning certain things/products or suppressing mention of them).

Google search is getting increasingly useless as a constant flood of AI slop websites fills their results and people will abandon searching with if they can't find some way to provide people with the information they are looking for. (it's not going well so far https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...)

Yup I could see that being plausible. It’s like Microsoft and Copilot. Project managers got to boast how they got AI “adoption” numbers up just by shoving it into people’s faces.

Most will end up in deep regrets, ie how jobs regretted being an asocial dick and all above to his own family before dying (thats the better outcome, many simply see them as stars of their show till last moments, like potus for example). Its not some secret cabal, these people if smart naturally bubble to top of social and financial hierarchies.

It used to be much less visible, some sort of on-surface decency momentum and shit behind the curtains, now everything is out in the open for whole civilization to see instantly and its pretty tiring and nauseating.

If you don't get it its fine, it means you are a normal human being, probably well balanced. Folks like that abhor such people personally, be it c-suites of corporations or politicians or just a pos colleague.

I do sort of wonder how much longer Googles search API will even be a thing. They clearly have no interest in running a search engine anymore and are becoming actively hostile to the open web.

There was a period of time where even posting in r/lockdownskepticism would get you banned from (I'm making this up, I don't have the list. the point is it's like all the mainstream subs) r/funny r/pics etc etc

Free, terrible ad-riddled and essentially broken

Paid, you are the customer not the product.

Have you noticed how many people already use AI to do their thinking for them. They just ask it what to think, what to do, for everything. They want that for as many people as possible. They don’t want people going outside of Google to other websites to decide what to think. Yes they will put ads in it eventually. But in the end they will also use it to influence what the population thinks.

We already have some leaders and politicians outsourcing their thinking in this way. It will make these companies incredibly powerful.

There are already ads in it, and also the chat stream is sold to companies which resell it to advertisers for targeting outside the chatbot.

Which is still OK to a degree, thanks to progress in AI, but noticeably not as good as it used to be and it shows.

Seems like now even with all their money they can no longer afford to do it without AI, so the "real thing" is priced out of reach not only for budget-conscious orgs such as education, but for everybody :\