> Google is using AI at such scale internally they don't need external customers to recoup their investment.

That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.

Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.

Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?

How does Google make money from that?

> That's assuming their flagship product remains relevant in an AI-powered world.

The big advantage Google has, in my opinion, is Android. I think there is a decent chance that people stop downloading the ChatGPT, Claude, etc. apps if they perceive that the phone just does the same out of the box for free. And I reckon the majority of people will prefer free, ad-ridden AI chat vs. paying subscriptions, at least for personal use. And on the B2B side, they have Workspace deeply embedded in a huge number of companies. So I wouldn't count Google out.

The funny thing about Google is that Google Search is happy to serve LLM labs search results if it drives their metrics up. Just like Google Cloud is happy to sell off compute to OAI an Anthropic to drive up their metrics.

Google also owns 15% of Anthropic and Hassabis, the leader of Deepmind, also is an early angel investor in Anthropic.

When you really break it down, it's not totally clear that Google would even care that much about being the SOTA LLM.

> Which brings to mind: most of the big shops product (chatgpt, claude, grok, etc...) ALL rely on search, and NONE of them actually have a running search stack.

Don't they? Based on traffic to some websites I run the big AI labs are very actively doing a lot of crawling.

Google's ad revenue has done really well so far in the LLM era, and wasup 12% year over year in 2025, and forecasted to do the same next year.

And that changes, then that's all the more reason for them to be investing in AI.

> Which means, they must all be calling Google, no?

Incorrect. Alternate search providers exist, such as Bing (used by DuckDuckGo, for example) and Brave.