AI revolution: Search is collapsing. Here is how to profit from AI | Metaglossia: The Translation World | Scoop.it
For those who can inject credibility, provenance and structure into the system, the next era of instant answer discovery offers a chance to lead.

"Google Search is collapsing. Here is how to profit from AI
For those who can inject credibility, provenance and structure into the system, the next era of instant answer discovery offers strategic upside and a chance to lead.


James Dore
Strategist
May 21, 2025 – 10.52am
Google Search is tanking.


The web’s main gateway is about to vanish in a puff of generative smoke. According to Statcounter, Google’s global search market share dropped below 90 per cent for the first time in nearly a decade.


Apple confirmed in 2025 that Safari-based Google searches had declined for the first time in 22 years. Referral traffic to news publishers has long been falling. AI is now accelerating that decline.



The search engine is being replaced by the answer engine. Getty


Artificial intelligence assistants are displacing search. Platforms such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Google’s SGE are becoming the default for getting fast, confident answers. But these systems don’t cite sources in any meaningful way. They replace discovery with assertion, and increasingly, they’re learning from content that they or their peers already produced.


We’ve entered the search ouroboros. It feeds on its own outputs and erodes its utility. If we reach the tipping point where both search and content are AI-generated, the system becomes fully recursive. A closed loop. A Frankenstein’s monster where truth is untethered from fact.


The implications are existential: for publishers, for educators, for policymakers and for anyone who believes a functioning democracy relies on discoverable, verifiable information.


The end of search
Google’s dominance is no longer guaranteed. Its share of global search traffic is slipping. In 2024, Google’s SGE trial led to a 44 per cent drop in link clicks.


“The internet may be eating itself. But feeding it wisely can break the cycle.”


Gartner predicts global search volume will drop 25 per cent by 2026 as AI tools replace basic queries. In the US, 58.5 per cent of Google searches already end without a single click.


SGE is Google’s attempt to stay relevant, but it signals a shift away from discovery. For content creators, there are fewer ways in.


The rise of AI as truth
Search historically pointed outwards, ranking results by authority, relevance and freshness. AI flattened that model.


The problem? The input pool is already changing. Estimates suggest over 30 per cent of web content in 2024 was AI-generated, and rising fast. Content farms and SEO-optimised spam are increasingly built for generative engines, not humans.


This is not just a quality issue. It’s an epistemic one. When the inputs are synthetic, the outputs become untethered. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, clarity degrades. Verifiability disappears. Truth blurs into statistical probability.


The diminishing loop: AI feeding AI
LLMs, the foundation for tools like ChatGPT were trained on a snapshot of the world. That world is now increasingly shaped by those same models’ outputs.


This is model pollution: the point where AI-generated content floods the web, drowning out verifiable information.


With no metadata, attribution or accuracy incentives, AIs are training on themselves. Credibility is eroding, and the system risks converging into homogenised consensus. Once LLMs dominate knowledge access, misinformation will not be fringe. It will be standard.


Why this is an opportunity for the brave
I’m arguably part of the problem. I’ve built programmatic tools that help clients game traditional search rankings and LLM visibility. In doing so, I’ve fed the very machine that I’m warning you about. That may work now, but it proves the system still rewards scale over substance and remains brittle.


But in that brittleness lies opportunity. The advantage now lies with those who inject trust and provenance.


Major publishers and other sources of high-quality content should be racing to sign licensing agreements with OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity and their ilk. It’s a rare win-win: LLMs desperately need trusted, human-authored content to ground their outputs. Traditional media needs alternatives to the collapsing search funnel. Those who move first will shape how future answers are surfaced and attributed.


Reddit, the AP and Politico license content to OpenAI. A startup could do the same with verified sources, but Facebook’s failed fact-checking showed why authority must be decentralised and democratised.


It comes at a cost
The moment AI replaces links with answers, monetisation models break. Referral traffic drops. CPMs collapse. The ad-supported web cannot survive this shift. Google earned $175 billion from search ads in 2023.


Which is why monetising the query layer is next. Not just through API access or licensing, but through real, scaled incentives for publishers. If GPTs become the new homepage, then attention must be compensated upstream.


This demands a rethink of how content is structured, attributed and surfaced. Publishers should not fear AI. They should optimise for it, build schemas, enforce provenance, and create incentives for users to go beyond the summary.


GPTs have not yet found the right balance of monetisation, sustainability and competitive equity. In generative SEO, success means becoming part of the model’s memory.


The endgame
We are watching the web rewire itself. The search engine is being replaced by the answer engine. If left unchecked, that engine will soon spin into machine-confirmation bias, where self-reinforcing predictions masquerade as truth.


But it can be reversed. Trusted content creators, those with authority, rigour and real-world grounding, have a rare moment to become the backbone of the next knowledge layer.


The internet may be eating itself. But feeding it wisely can break the cycle."
https://www.afr.com/technology/google-search-is-collapsing-here-is-how-to-profit-from-ai-20250521-p5m0yl