I have written a lot on this before, but with recent moves by all the big tech players, it bears repetition: Every AI company is making a frontal attack on the so-far-impregnable fort that Google has created with Search. Defeat for the emperor will, however, come not from without, but from within.

The market for Search is $200bn, growing at 10% every year to $400bn in 2035, with a fat 60% gross margin. 90% of this is owned by one player, Google, who guards it as jealously as its very own Kohinoor. For decades, enemies and competitors have fruitlessly pounded its thick walls. Microsoft has been trying for decades now, but has only about a 4% share to show for it, though even with this miniscule share, it is a $12.6bn business. Yahoo had battered its Search head against the same walls years ago, only to ignominiously retreat from the battlefield. So did smaller, nimbler players – the intellectual Wolfram Alpha, the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo, and an ad-free Neeva, which created a minor stir, but was smothered to non-existence by its much larger competitor. Google, meanwhile, continues to dominate; its latest quarterly earnings reveal a 12% search revenue growth to $88.3bn. It is still the clear leader with the best and fastest results. It is a veritable synonym for search, a verb for may, and its use of AI to hone search results keeps on getting better every year. However, perhaps for the first time, its citadel does not appear as formidable as it once did.

Competitors continue to snap at its heels, and this time they have a new weapon in their arsenal – Generative AI. The first one to make a mark was Perplexity, a startup which treats Search differently. Rather than serving up the ten blue links, it hunts the web and uses AI to write a succinct summary of its findings and annotates the same with the sources it used for its answer. It was Microsoft, though, which was first off the block, integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT deeply into its Bing search, with CEO, Satya Nadella, gleefully proclaiming that it will make the ‘800 pound gorilla (Google) dance’ with this new innovation. However, the music seems to have stopped for Nadella, as Google shrugged that off and continued its dominance. OpenAI just launching its ChatGPT Search; while it looks very like Perplexity, its 200mn plus people use it weekly users gives it a scale advantage. A bigger threat is Meta, reportedly working on its own search product. Meta boasts word-class AI capabilities with its LlaMA family of LLMs, and is the only company which can rival Google in distribution, touching 3.5bn people daily.

Google has been no slouch in incorporating its Gemini LLM into its own search engine; however, its efforts seem to be half hearted. The ’10 blue links’ still hold pride of place, with GenAI based search as a reluctant and apologetic afterthought. Google is sitting right on the top of the horns of the Innovator’s Dilemma – which explains why established leaders focus too much on their current successful products, missing or undermining new technologies or business models that initially serve only a small market but eventually disrupt the entire industry. The danger of launching something that would cannibalise its own business seems to be too great for Google. Therefore, the main screen are still all sponsored results, and the rest of the screen is all advertising. Monopolistic leadership has undermined user experience: the page prioritises advertiser links over actual results that the user is looking for, as the company seems to prioritise advertisers over end customers. As Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas puts it: “The one thing that Google got wrong is that the same unit of information that stands for truth, which is the links, is also the same unit of information that the advertiser bids on. So that’s where there’s a conflict between serving the user and serving the advertiser.” Thene there

are the regulators in EU, US and India who are circling the wagons questioning Googles dominance, inevitably hobbling risk-taking and innovation.

That is why I believe that the only real credible threat for Google not from outside, but from within. It might surprise people to know that the Transformer, the driving force behind Generative AI, was built in Google’s Labs. However, due to either the Dilemma or reputation risk, Google did not do much with it, while a startup called OpenAI ran with it and changed the world. Thus, it was this Trojan Horse of GenAI, within the ramparts of Google’s fort, which could be the reason for its downfall, and not its various foes futilely battering its walls from outside.