As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?
In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.
Back in the day when I was covering Google on a daily basis, I’d have spent hours poring over yesterday’s news that the judge in Google’s landmark antitrust case essentially blinked. But twenty-odd years of experience leaves me with very little to say about how Google’s first anti-trust case has been resolved, other than this: It’s a nothing burger, with a side of same-as-it-ever-was.
Over the course of nearly four years since the government brought its case, a lot has changed:
The United States has veered away from liberal democracy toward illiberal autocracy, and the current administration is no longer interested in grand antitrust remedies that serve the public. Today, everything is seen through the lens of whether a given action or decision furthers the President’s power. Preserving the status quo gives him leverage over powerful actors – he can continue to threaten and bully, ensuring fealty and tribute. In this administration, as in Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing, no one is allowed to have more power than the Dear Leader.
As I laid out in my predictions nine months ago, the tech industry is now the most powerful force in politics outside the President, and its two most muscular companies – Apple and Google – did not want their duopoly upended. We’ll likely never know what soft-power backroom deals were cut to avoid what nearly every legal scholar felt was justified action by the government, but to think those dynamics didn’t impact this decision is to ignore the reality of my first point above.
OpenAI’s existence became a convenient foil. The emergence of generative AI has given Google (and the judge in this case) the ability to argue that the DOJ was fighting yesterday’s war. Sure, Google might have been a search monopolist, but look – OpenAI is proof that the market is always smarter than government regulators! Never mind the fact that search literally built the foundation for generative AI, or that generative AI is the natural evolution of search – a product that Google will continue to dominate now that government remedies have been rendered toothless.
Google – and its $20 billion partner Apple – are likely doing cartwheels today. Wall Street certainly is.
(This piece is cross-posted from Signal360, where it first appeared)
OK, Google, What’s The Business Model?
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” -Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
If you work in marketing, Hemingway’s famous passage about bankruptcy will likely resonate. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 prompted dire predictions that search’s role as a reliable driver of traffic and sales was coming to a close. For the past three years, however, those predictions seemed overwrought. Despite a slight dip in January, which proved temporary, Google has maintained a steady grip on 90 percent of search activity, and continues to direct a firehose of leads and commerce across the web.
But rather suddenly — in the past two months, in fact — it seems everything has changed. Google announced and immediately shipped “AI Mode,” its answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company had already implemented “AI Overviews” in 2024, essentially an evolution to its “One Box” feature that provides AI summaries for queries above Google’s familiar list of blue links. According to one study, those summaries are already responsible for a nearly 35 percent decline in outbound clicks — the lifeblood of traditional search engine marketing.
Google knows the question is no longer if AI is replacing search, but rather how quickly. Industry analyst Mary Meeker has an answer: AI adoption, she asserts, represents the fastest change in consumer behavior in the history of digital technology.
With AI Mode, Google has decided to push all in. The company understands that consumers are finding AI chatbots a superior search experience. One recent study found that “more than a quarter of Americans (27%) now use AI chatbots like ChatGPT instead of traditional search engines.” And consulting giant Bain found that “about 80 percent of consumers now rely on “zero-click” results in at least 40 percent of their searches.”
Google knows it’s taking a risk by moving quickly, but no matter what, it must keep its grip on the information-gathering habits of its billions of consumers. That leaves a major question unanswered: If search as we knew it is going away, what will replace search marketing as we knew it? What will supplant the time-honored practices of “SEO” and “SEM”?
If you’ve been exploring this question, you are most likely overwhelmed by a slew of firms, from early stage startups to massive agencies and consulting firms, all claiming an intuitive and familiar answer: “SEO, but for answer engines.”
Some call it “GEO,” short for “generative engine optimization,” and others have dubbed their solution “AEO,” for answer engine optimization. Regardless of nomenclature, the goal is the same: a set of best practices that position a product, service or brand to succeed in the brave new world of AI chatbots.
Chatbots “have been a huge wake up call,” says Pete Blackshaw, CEO of BrandRank.ai, a startup that helps brands adapt to what it calls the “answer economy.” “The trillion-dollar brand marketing industry is being severely disrupted by AI search, and marketers don’t know how to measure it, where to start, or how to win.”
It’s still early, but what’s already clear is that “winning” in AI search means playing a very different game. AI chatbots are the ultimate black boxes – even the companies that run them have no idea how the technology chooses its answers. That means marketers accustomed to precise dashboards of SEM and SEO-driven results must go back to basics. Blackshaw advises his clients to focus on understanding the content ecosystem that informs answer engines’ inputs. The often neglected brand website, for example, “is a fueling station for an AI chatbot,” he says.
Along with similar offerings from companies like Anvil and Profound, BrandRank offers dashboards to help clients understand how their brands are performing inside various answer engines like Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and Google. Once you understand where you stand, you can get to work building out content strategies that might improve your brand’s performance overall.
If that sounds squishy, that’s because in an age of chatbots, it’s harder for brands to hide behind paid marketing. Answer engines scour a massive corpus of data to source their answers, and seem to favor community forums like Reddit or authoritative sites like Wikipedia — neither of which are particularly easy for marketers to influence.
“You can’t control how or when you’re going to be mentioned” in AI answer results, observes Bill Gross, the fabled inventor of paid search, now CEO of ProRata.ai. “There’s no statistics, no reporting.” Gross believes he has a solution: ProRata has developed a platform that builds AI-generated ad units that are contextual to the content of a particular chat. In short, Gross is building AdSense for AI – an approach that allows marketers to buy their way into the AI conversation. But it’s still early days — ProRata has yet to sign a major client like Claude or Perplexity.
In the end, what matters most will be how Google adapts its world-beating advertising services to the emerging experiences of AI chat. For now, Google is treating the various “surfaces” of its AI products as just another channel for its massive AdWords and AdSense businesses. But sometime soon, the company will be compelled to roll out AI-specific advertising units that are purpose built for AI conversations.
What might that look like? On that question, Google has so far remained mute. “Everyone thinks we know the answer to that question,” one source inside Google told me. “We might know more than many,” my source continued, but when it comes to what an AI version of AdWords might look like, an admission: “We don’t have a clue.”
Regardless of whether or not Google has a plan to pivot its $350 billion advertising business toward AI, the fact remains that hundreds of millions of consumers – in particular younger generations – now deploy AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to do everything from work-related research to more traditional search behaviors like comparing product reviews or finding new restaurants to visit. Oh, and on the horizon? AI agents that do the searching and possibly even the purchasing on behalf of consumers.
Given the pace and complexity of change, seasoned experts in search advise brand managers to move to a wartime footing. The rise of AI is likely to be “more impactful than the introduction of the Web in the mid 1990s,” said GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan, an industry veteran who ran search at Overture and Yahoo, then helmed OpenX during the rise of programmatic advertising. To win the day, marketers must be “extremely observant and agile,” he continued. “I don’t think any of us know what is going to happen. Whatever happens will happen very quickly. We have to be prepared to throw out the old ways of doing things.”
Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.
Back when the Internet was young, when the dot-com wave broke across the monied shoals of Wall Street opportunism, Gross built a world-changing company, took it public, then sold it for billions.
This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing an anti-trust case – that happened last summer. Nor was it the first ten days of Google’s ongoing search remedies trial. Instead, it was a statement just two days ago by an Apple executive, Eddie Cue, which led to an almost instantaneous panic amongst investors.
Cue told the court that consumers’ preference for using AI agents had led to a decline in search traffic inside Apple’s Safari browser (Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to secure that traffic – a major focal point of the government’s case).
Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered, and every path taken (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the key stuff). I’ve tracked this extraordinary artifact since 2003, and have come to believe that Google’s control over it has become a inhibitor to innovation and flourishing in our society.
The US government – yes, even this one – agrees with me. In the nearly three decades since Google first launched, the company has gone from champion of the open Internet to established monopolist whose principle business is protecting its profits. With the advent of consumer AI, that principle business is imperiled. Google is protecting a revenue stream that it must understand is no longer defensible, either by law or by practice.
Look, I’m not much of an AI image-generation prompt writer.
This isn’t going to be a normal year.
2025 will be strange, frenetic, and full of surprises, particularly for those of us who watch tech closely. We’re not accustomed to the tech industry having this much raw power. The finance industry? Sure. For decades, we watched leaders from Goldman rotate through every administration’s cabinet and economic team, and we got used to it. But this year, for the first time ever, Big Tech has leap-frogged finance in the pantheon of political influence. And while the finance bros have a reliable and predictable ideology – capital is king – the subset of Big Tech bros who’ve bought their way into the Oval are evangelists for an untested and downright strange brand of magical thinking best summed up as “techno optimism.” The sophomoric claptrap underpinning Andreessen and Musk’s approach to politics may not be representative of the tech industry overall, but for better or for worse, 2025 is going to be the year when the loudest voices in the room are all adherents of the Great Man Theory, and they all happen to have direct access to the Oval Office.
This morning we awoke to one story dominating the tech news landscape: OpenAI is “expanding into search,” launching SearchGPT, a prototype that appears to be a direct competitor to Google (and Bing and Perplexity, not that they really matter). But despite the voluminous coverage, my initial take is that once the hype cycle passes – I give it a day or two – OpenAI’s true goal will emerge: fixing the optics of its approach to training data.
The company doesn’t have the resources to take on Google on its core turf. So why announce SearchGPT now? This is speculation, but I’d wager it’s because the company is in a perilous place. It built its business – one that could lose up to $5 billion this year – by scarfing up the entire Internet, mostly without permission. It’s facing a serious backlash from both established publishers and governments. In response, it’s been busy cutting deals with as many partners as it can, and this search prototype feels driven by those optics.
Reading Ben Thompson’s coverage of Google’s earnings call this week, one thing jumps out, and simply can’t be ignored: Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked a simple question, and, as Thompson points out, Pichai dodged it completely. A Merril analyst asked this question:
“Just wondering if you see any changes in query volumes, positive or negative, since you’ve seen the year evolve and more Search innovative experiences.”
Back in the day when I was covering Google on a daily basis, I’d have spent hours poring over yesterday’s news that the judge in Google’s landmark antitrust case 
Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of 
[Second in a series, first post 
