And that’s exactly my point. The revenue needs to come from ads interjected into Gemini or premium subscriptions to Gemini. So if Google sat out the AI race they’d be stuck renting from other providers or just ceding their dominant search engine position to the likes of OpenAI.

> The revenue needs to come from ads interjected into Gemini or premium subscriptions to Gemini.

Fine, but how much revenue can be derived from this? I'd posit not much so long as Google sticks with CPC pricing.

I definitely agree that it’s very likely to be a worse business than search has been for the past couple of decades.

I think people who see AI search ads as a worse business than web search ads aren't thinking avariciously enough.

AI results are their own citation- and context-free reality.

If Pepsi pays Google $100M for every statistical +10% they give recommendations of Pepsi over Coke in Gemini... how would anyone ever know?

Google hasn't done that obviously yet, because they have the cash to weather the choppy PR waters around public AI perception, but once AI is normalized it's going to be trivial to turn the knob on managed models.

Especially free ones, served cost efficiently by Google's infra backend, pushed via the most widely used phone OS and browser in the world.

The monetization (and user profiling) opportunities make web tracking and ads look like kids' toys.

This is just false. Their search business is still growing, just not as fast as before.

You have a nice slogan, but doesn’t hold up

That’s still the trend moving in the wrong direction for Google.

We could have made the same statement about landline telephones or cable television in the past.