At the end of the year I was reading an article from Frank Palermo of CmsWire.com on whether AI powered search engines will disrupt traditional search? Frank wrote that AI is now changing the search game, most likely forever. But there remains a lot of work to do.
SearchEngineLand.com published an article today that Google’s share of global search fell below 90% for the first time in a decade.
From the article:
Google’s share of the global search engine market fell below 90% for the first time since 2015, according to Statcounter. Google’s global search market share was under 90% during each of the final three months of 2024.
The data. Here’s a screenshot of the 2024 search market share, showing Google dipping below 90% – to 89.34% in October; 89.99% in November; and 89.73% in December:
Of course Google is working on AI search as well and it might signal the loss of business for many affiliates and small businesses.
The Gist
- The rise of AI search. AI-powered search engines are reshaping traditional search and offering more organized and relevant results.
- Google’s dominance. Despite the rise of AI search, Google remains dominant with its vast data advantage, making it difficult for competitors to catch up.
- SEO shifts ahead. As AI-powered search engines evolve, SEO strategies must adapt, focusing on user intent rather than traditional keyword strategies.
- Will AI replace search? These AI platforms are changing the capabilities of search, but it’s uncertain if they can take over established search platforms.
Search has had a good run. It’s been the ultimate cash cow for decades. But will AI kill traditional search as we know it?
The game change
Google’s search algorithm has been in use since the launch of Google’s search engine on September 4, 1998. Google handles more than 8.5 billion search queries on a daily basis, and there are approximately 6.3 million searches conducted on Google every minute.
The original algorithm, called PageRank, was created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank ranked search results based on the number and quality of links to a page. PageRank operated “by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is.” The underlying assumption was that more important websites were likely to receive more links from other websites.
This changed the way people would use the internet forever.
As generative AI platforms begin to launch their own AI-powered search engines, every major search engine — including Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Baidu in China — are scrambling to add their own generative AI capabilities to their search platform to avoid disruption.
Will this be enough to preserve the monopoly search has had on the internet? Will these tools remain separate or converge over time? And what does this mean for marketers?
