Haters Gonna Hate, Google Gonna Dominate 😎

Full disclosure: I'm a Google trusted tester with early access to their products and a GOOG investor. This doesn't sway my judgment; my investments and relationships are diversified across the industry.

Just two years ago, I was publicly calling for Sundar Pichai's head, convinced Google was fumbling its AI future while Microsoft roared under Satya.

I love an underdog, but no tech giant has made me eat my words on AI quite like Google.

Two months back, I shared how Google had flipped my skepticism, hinting they were brewing something big to defend their web dominance. Yesterday, at I/O, those plans exploded into the open.

The takeaway is clear: as of May 2025, the race for mass-market AI dominance is a two-horse show: OpenAI versus Google. Everyone else? Playing in their niches.

AI isn’t killing Google — It’s bringing it back alive

GOOG shares fell as much as 7.5% in a single session earlier this month on fears that AI would completely eat up Search market.

I was sure this paranoia would go as well as the tantrum US media threw around DeepSeek and ‘China’s AI threat’ before everything came back to normal.

The narrative predicting Google's doom hinges on two undeniable truths:

• The era of sifting through 10 blue links is over. ✅

• Users increasingly crave conversational AI – quick, direct answers from something that feels like it understands them, not a 2,000-word SEO-driven article from a clueless, underpaid content mill. ✅

Yet, to conclude this spells Google's end? That’s a leap in logic vast enough to clear the Grand Canyon.

Sure, this shift does threaten a whole ecosystem: SEO agencies, content writers in developing countries churning out articles, news organizations.

The one player it doesn't fatally threaten? Google. Why? Because they saw this coming and got their act together long before the water rose too high.

At its flagship I/O conference yesterday, Google revealed "AI Overviews" are already a hit, driving a 10% rise in search queries. Pichai even dubbed them the “most successful addition to Search in over a decade.”

Anecdotally, AI Overviews have become remarkably good, hitting the sweet spot before even early tech adopters fully switched their muscle memory from "Googling" to typing "chatgpt.com."

Consider how current LLMs work: they're trained up to a cut-off date (say, April 2025). For real-time info, AIs like Perplexity or ChatGPT Web Search essentially perform a Bing search or use a partner API, then summarize.

The recipe for success here is twofold: 1) A good base LLM, and 2) Stellar search/information retrieval.

Guess who's been the undisputed leader in part two for over two decades? Hint: It's not Bing or DuckDuckGo. It's Google.

With "AI mode" now public, Google actually gains an edge.

For years, Google Search has faced criticism for declining quality, with SEO gaming results over genuine expertise. AI Overviews offer a way out. Instead of a 2,000-word slog, you get a straightforward answer.

Not all queries need a deep dive. AI Overviews handle quick questions, while the new "AI Mode" offers a chatbot experience for follow-ups and longer conversations.

Meanwhile, Google’s unparalleled dominance in search algorithms remains its trump card. And now, it's also competing head-to-head with OpenAI and Meta with its impressive Gemini LLM line. The Gemini-2.5-Pro is arguably a top contender, if not the best all-around model publicly available.

So, just because you now get info from Google via a different mechanism doesn’t mean Search is dead. It just means the 10 blue links are.

And for Google, that might just be a new lease on life.

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