We don’t need anecdotes. We have data. Google has been announcing quarter after quarter of record revenues and profits and hasn’t seen any decrease in search traffic. Apple also hinted at the fact that it also didn’t see any decreased revenues from the Google Search deal.

AI answers is good enough and there is a long history of companies who couldn’t monetize traffic via ads. The canonical example is Yahoo. Yahoo was one of the most traffic sites for 20 years and couldn’t monetize.

2nd issue: defaults matter. Google is the default search engine for Android devices, iOS devices and Macs whether users are using Safari or Chrome. It’s hard to get people to switch

3rd issue: any money that OpenAI makes off search ads, I’m sure Microsoft is going to want there cut. ChatGPT uses Bing

4th issue: OpenAIs costs are a lot higher than Google and they probably won’t be able to command a premium in ads. Google has its own search engine, its own servers, its own “GPUs” [sic],

5th: see #4. It costs OpenAI a lot more per ChatGPT request to serve a result than it costs Google. LLM search has a higher marginal cost.