10 ms·
Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?
by throwaway_20357 5mo ago
Can anyone explain how search revenue is still _growing_ in the age of LLMs?
- miohtama 5mo agoMonopoly pricing power
- cm2012 5mo agoAd targeting llms continue to improve
- kyrra 5mo agoGemini in search (AI Overview) is likely the most used LLM in the world, and ads can still surface around it. (googler, opinions are my own. I know nothing about this outside of external info)
- mghackerlady 5mo agoIs it the most used LLM because people want to use it, or because it literally can't be turned off aside from an obscure search parameter or using a slur in your search
- arealaccount 5mo agoDo chatbots click ads?
- bitpush 5mo agoAds dont need click to be effective.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoI don't think I've ever clicked on an ad on purpose
- bitpush 5mo agoYet, ads are super effective. Think of the many Apple ads you watch, and how enticing those devices look. Brand awareness is all that matters. Apple isnt counting on me clicking on the ad to buy the macbook
- tempest_ 5mo agoSame way all big companies do, start changing what "search" means and including things under "search" that you might not think belongs there.
- dalemhurley 5mo agoNot everyone is using LLMs and people who do are probably using Google for higher value and targeted search.
- nostrademons 5mo agoHave you looked at the results for any commercial query, something like [sofa beds] or [hard drives]? It is basically 100% ads. Anything where the user is intending to spend money, they show only ads, and have all the top producers in the world bid against each other for who gets featured, and Google captures essentially all surplus value in the transaction. My wife is an investor, and one of her portfolio areas is pharmaceuticals. A couple of portfolio companies have reported that it's becoming basically impossible to make any money off of a new product, because you need to advertise it to reach the customer, and Google will skim all the excess producer surplus off as you compete with other startups serving the same market. It's basically the perfect business model. They own the path to the consumer, which means they own the economy. I'd also recently hired someone out of Google Search, and they said that the only queries that "legacy" (non-AI-mode) search cares about are commercial-seeking queries, and the only metric they optimize for is ad conversions on those. It literally is thousands of people whose only job is to get you to click more ads.
- mgh2 5mo agoIs there some writing on the wall? In the future if LLMs are more efficient and eventually commoditized, needing less infraestructure to be run (think on-device as chip efficiency increases). Apple can eventually just make their own, and provided they don’t benefit from the Google partnership anymore, who will need a search engine aside from Android and PCs?
- bitpush 5mo ago> In the future if LLMs are more efficient and eventually commoditized, needing less infraestructure to be run (think on-device as chip efficiency increases). You speak as if this is given. Sure, LLMs are gonna get effective but frontier ones are always going to be hosted. Also, on-device LLMs are gonna have a 'cutoff' for training data. You cant ask a gpt-oss4 about "Who won Arsenal x Athetico Madrid game". It has to go to the internet, and do the 'search'. You certainly cant ask the local model "What was Google's Q1 2026 earnings". The self-hosted / on-device LLMs are going to do a lot, but not all and the moment 'search' is involved, people will reach for Google. -- Lots of commercial queries need to be 'fresh' ("Build me an itinerary for Paris"). While a self-hosted LLM can do it, you might not want to trust it, because its info might be stale. I encourage you to go beyond group think (HN is guilty of that) and really evaluate your position is actually valid or not.
- duodecimal 5mo agoMany LLM agents do automated web searches.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoWhy would llms replace search? It was a crazy take in 2023 and is still one today. Suppose there are no search engines and you want to find some headphones. How exactly are you doing this with llms?
- furyofantares 5mo agoPersonally, I use an LLM to use the search engine. I don't know how this impacts search revenue. It might increase it!
- shimon 5mo agoActually no, LLMs (preferably tool-using LLMs that can themselves do web searches and price lookups) are a great way to shop, especially if you're looking in a category and don't know exactly what item you want. You just say "I want to find some headphones" and it makes you some recommendations. Or it helps you nail down what you're looking for first and then gives you options at various price points. I've found this useful when shopping for cars, computers, tourist activities, and much more.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoIn my example there are no search engines. And if there were why would they allow tool calls?
- crowcroft 5mo agoYour premise is absurd. Search engines do exist, and search engines do allow tool calls. Try find an AI chat provider that doesn't connect web search to the agent.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoBing and google do not give you free and unlimited calls. And of course there are many clients… which harness lets you call bing or google on all devices locally? As far as the premise goes, people on this very site were saying it. The very parent is surprised search is growing.
- msabalau 5mo agoIt literally doesn't matter why search revenue is growing. What is observably true is that it is that it is growing, as has it has been, throughout the LLM era. Absent additional information, no one else can identify the false assumption underlies a strong belief that this should not be case. But something is flying in the face of the facts, and has been for a while. So, yeah, might want to take a look at those priors.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- harrall 5mo agoI have access to ChatCPT, Gemini, Claude and you know what I still do 99% of the time? I open Google Search. If I want an LLM, I click “AI Mode.” I only bother to open Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude if it’s a “big research thing” which is almost never.
- justinbaker84 5mo agoI have been wondering the same thing myself. I manage google ads for a living and I don't understand why I still have a job. Personally I use AI chatbots to help me make every purchase decision I have to think about.
- RandallBrown 5mo agoHow do you find the place to buy the thing you're looking for? I just tried asking ChatGPT where to buy a backpack I'm looking for and it just... did a search. It would have been considerably faster to just do the search myself instead of wade through the slop about how "This backpack is hard to find in stock, you'll need to buy it directly from the brand yada yada yada".
- processing 5mo ago4 top paid search results (take up the entire screen) AI overview (organic for now?) 3 organic results (below the fold) 2 paid search results Image results 1 organic result If I don't run paid ads I don't get leads I rank organically for a lot of the keyphrases I'm bidding on (top 3 results)...organic 0-2 calls a week, paid ads 4-6 calls a week (niche business).
- crowcroft 5mo agoFor most people Google Search is the LLM they're using. Another way to think about this is that LLM based search actually grows the entire pie for search and so multiple players can all be growing at the same time. The real losers are publishers, blogs, forums etc. Instead of traffic going to them that traffic is being turned into more search queries and more LLM responses.
- maxdo 5mo agoit's an interesting phenomena. In the early days of internet everybody tried to pretend or they just had lots of money. Right now lots of top tier online resources just become not usable due to amount of ads. It used to be a sign of a 3rd tier website.
- Keyframe 5mo agogoogle search serves llm answer on top. It IS llm (hybrid with search results and ads). There's Lens as well.