AI hits the first dents in Google’s armor

Google currently pays $ 20 billion a year to be the standard search engine for Apple products. That position seems to be in danger because an Apple CEO revealed during a lawsuit that the company is seriously considering adding AI to his browser.

Perhaps even more painful is that the number of Google search assignments on Apple’s safari showed a decrease last month for the first time.

The first dents in Google’s armor

That sounds like a small ripple, but for a company like Alphabet, which gets more than half of its turnover and the majority of his profit from search traffic, it is a serious thump.

What makes it even more painful? The suspicion that users are increasingly asking their questions for AI systems from companies such as OpenAi or Anthropic, instead of Google itself. The idea that “Googling” is slowly dying out was once science fiction. Now it suddenly starts to feel real.

After the court case, Alphabet hurried with a blog post in which it states that searches are still increasing, also via Apple devices. But that reassurance only came after the share on Wednesday by 7.3%. On a weekly basis there is now an expected decrease in around 6%, good for a loss in market value of around 120 billion dollars.

Alphabet loses its dairy cow?

“The key question is: Alphabet loses his milk cow?”, Said Art Hogan of B. Riley Wealth Management. And that is no longer a rhetorical question. Since the creation of the search engine market, Google has been virtually inviolable, but that era seems to have ended.

The timing is bitter. While Alphabet uses hard on AI with Gemini, it now appears that competitors such as OpenAi are increasingly the starting point for online questions. Apple only has to open the door.

What makes this situation unique is that this is not just a competition. This is a fundamental shift in how people are looking for information. Instead of left in a list, users want to answer directly, in natural language. Whoever delivers that best wins.

And for the first time in twenty years, Google does not seem to win that struggle automatically.