You can bury the premature predictions of Google Search’s death at the hands of AI. Turns out, LLMs have been a boon for the advert–er, search, company.
According to an article this week in the Wall Street Journal, search revenue from April through June was up 12% from the same time last year, making it Google’s best quarter ever.
What’s going on? At least three things:
Users are digging Google’s AI Overview tool, which grew from 1.5 billion monthly users in the first quarter to 2 billion monthly users in the second.
Ummm, it owns the world’s biggest browser, in case you forgot. Why navigate to ChatGPT for everything when you can peck something into your search bar and get back a decent AI response? (Which is why OpenAI and Perplexity are releasing their own browsers.)
It can pay for whatever it wants. In the past, it’s purchased Android to stay relevant for mobile search, doled out dollars to Apple to have Safari default to Google search, and, oh yeah, spent a ton on AI computing to head off Microsoft.
But Google’s always adjusting its formula (just ask any sad content creator who would’ve been rich if that pesky algorithm hadn’t changed). This week, the company unveiled an experimental feature called Web Guide. It’s like a hybrid of Search and AI—you still get the links front and center like the Google of old, but they’re organized using generative AI. It may just mean that the thing that finally kills the Google algorithm is…Google.
Enough about Google—what about me?
Under the calm, crystalline waters of Google’s dominance, there’s a lot of churn. Per the WSJ, although users are being exposed to more links, they’re clicking on fewer revenue-generating ones.
Downstream, then, SEO tools as a category is in a state of flux. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush still dominate if you want to rank for SEO, but an increasing number of SEO tool launches on Product Hunt are explicitly referencing AI (and sometimes not even bothering with the search engine). In the last six weeks we’ve seen:
Search Console Audit, which scans your Google Search Console and tells you how to get more traffic on both Google and ChatGPT
Blogwald, a newsletter tool that optimizes for Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT searches
LLM SEO Report, which lets you see what AI assistants think about your brand
So, hold off on the obituaries for now. Google Search and SEO tools aren’t dead yet. They’re just getting facelifts.