Google

Stats from a dying web

A startling statistic from Google’s antitrust trial raises fears that a long-predicted decline has now begun

Casey Newton

Casey Newton

— 11 min read
Stats from a dying web
(Solen Feyissa / Unsplash)

This is a column about AI. My boyfriend works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

I.

For more than a year now, I’ve had one eye trained on how generative AI will reshape the web. My primary fear has been that large language models like those found in ChatGPT are now good enough that large numbers of people are beginning to abandon traditional search engines, starving publishers and websites of the traffic and money they need to continue operating. While some publishers have made lucrative deals with AI labs, on balance the number of jobs in journalism is shrinking. And I’m not the only person worried: last month, Pew Research reported that about half of Americans believe that AI will be bad for journalism.

Until now, the effects of AI on the web have mostly been theoretical. But this week, an Apple executive testifying in the remedy phase of Google’s antitrust trial offered a piece of information that spooked observers of both companies.

Here are Emma Roth and Lauren Feiner at The Verge:

Google searches fell in Safari for the first time ever last month, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, said during Google’s antitrust trial on Wednesday. “That has never happened in 22 years,” Cue added.

Cue linked the dip in searches to the growing use of AI, which Apple is now considering integrating into Safari. The rise of web search in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot may make users less inclined to visit Google as their primary way of finding information.  

The fallout from Cue’s revelation was swift: Google’s stock price declined 7.5 percent, erasing $150 billion or so of market value, before recovering 1.93 percent today. In response, Google hustled up a statement with the urgency of a flight attendant telling passengers not to panic during a particularly jarring moment of turbulence. The company said: 

We continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance Search with new features, people are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens.

The first thing this statement does, quietly, is confirm that Cue’s testimony is accurate. (Something you can’t always take for granted with Apple executives these days.) The second thing it attempts to do is to reassure shareholders that it doesn’t matter. People might be making fewer searches in Safari, but they’re making more searches elsewhere. Google presents this as a natural evolution of search. You couldn’t always search by uploading a photo on your phone, for example; now you can using Lens, which is a feature of the Google app on iOS. If you love to search by taking photos, you might use the Google app more, and Safari a lot less.

I believe Google on this point. Rand Fishkin, an expert in search engine optimization and founder of the audience research company SparkToro, published a report last month that sought to put the rise of AI search in context against Google’s continued dominance. It found that Google searches rose 21.64 percent from 2023 to 2024. As Fishkin notes, this seems to be consistent with what Google CEO Sundar Pichai said when the company rolled out its AI overviews last year: that people who see them tend to do more searches.

Of course, the health of the web is not determined by the number of Google searches alone. Equally important is where people get their answers — and increasingly, they are getting their answers on Google. Multiple analyses have now found that Google’s AI overviews have resulted in declines of 70 to 80 percent in the click-through rates to the web pages from which they derive their information. That’s 70 to 80 percent fewer visits to web pages, and one of the primary web page-producing industries is shrinking accordingly:  CNN, Vox Media, HuffPost, and NBC are among the publishers that have announced layoffs in 2025 so far.

If only to reassure its shareholders, Google would prefer to leave the story there: its search engine still legitimately ascendant, and the threat of disruption largely neutralized. (Disruption from challengers, at least. There’s still the risk of state-mandated disruption: the US government is currently seeking to force the company to spin out its Chrome browser and divest itself of core pieces of its advertising monopoly.)

But investors’ panic earlier this week was not entirely unwarranted. There are signs of an actual shift happening in search, and it is not to Google’s benefit. 

It is not to the benefit of the web, either. 

II.

One of the week’s best-read feature stories was written by James D. Walsh at New York Magazine. Its headline: Everyone is cheating their way through college.

It opens on Roy Lee, the Columbia University student who made headlines earlier this year by releasing software designed to help engineers cheat their way through technical interviews at tech companies. (He subsequently raised $5.3 million to build an app that helps you “cheat on everything”; we talked to him on Hard Fork, too.)

To Walsh, Lee is only the most visible example of an increasingly undeniable trend. “In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments,” Walsh writes. 

It has only accelerated since then; one study found that AI usage among college students increased from 66 percent last year to 92 percent this year. Professors who can no longer reliably tell AI-generated assignments from student-written ones speak to Walsh of an existential despair.

In Silicon Valley, this is what is known as product-market fit.

And this market, unlike search, is competitive: as Walsh notes, students don’t only use ChatGPT: they use Google’s Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and Microsoft’s Copilot, among others. 

For the moment, Google’s AI overviews seem to have quelled the possibility of a sudden mass defection away from its core search engine. But it’s now clear that for the first time in decades, a generation is growing up with the possibility of using something other than Google as its default search. Today, they’re using ChatGPT to do all their homework assignments. By the time they graduate, they may be using it to do almost everything else. 

Google knows this, which is why it is seeking to pre-install Gemini on smartphones wherever it can. The company is having some success; Gemini is the second-most used chatbot after ChatGPT, according to Fishkin’s analysis, and Google overall handles 373 times as many searches as OpenAI’s bot.

But while there was once a time when the company could hand Apple $20 billion for default search placement and spend the rest of the year relaxing, Cue’s testimony shows why that is no longer the case. Bit by bit, current and future generations are shifting their habits away from traditional search and toward chatbots. Google can spend its many remaining billions of dollars on implementing Plan B. But it remains unclear what anyone else is supposed to do.

Elsewhere in the case: Mark Gurman argues persuasively that Cue's primary objective was to convince the judge that the search market is already so competitive that he should allow Google to continue paying it $20 billion a year. And M.G. Siegler has some more theories on why search declined on Safari.

On the podcast this week: Kevin and I discuss how freedom came to the App Store, and Apple's disastrous loss in court last week. Then author Karen Hao stops by to discuss her new book Empire of AI and the downsides of pursuing massive scale. And finally, I introduce Kevin to the world of Italian brainrot.

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Industry

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