“Recently”?? Have people not seen the findings of the AdTech Antitrust lawsuit they lost? Y’all should google it (heheh) especially the ad auction rigging parts of it, including Project Bernanke.

What they’re doing now is just being a lot more overt about it, because they want to carve up their old cash cow to feed their AI ambitions before ChatGPT and Claude eat it up first.

They can't juice, because advertisers are now good in calculating conversion rate, roas, cpa, etc, so they would shift budgets to other channels like overnight if see Google underperforming.

I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.

Course, they win anyway because I also pay for youtube premium to avoid seeing ads..

Feels like the world is becoming a split between people who can afford not to be the product and people who cannot.

Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!

If this is true how is it not fraud or just regular old theft?

Fascinating read, thanks! The counterpoint to "slaughtering the golden goose" is: If you're all in with AI, this is the rational thing to do, no? If AI takes over, search becomes irrelevant, so better extract as much value from search as possible while it's decaying and not dead yet.

Advertisers would have pulled out and Google would have lost revenue instead of increasing.

I'm not a believer in Google search long term, but advertisers continue to pay because they still get value - even if Google increases prices.

You should submit this as its own story. This is big if true, so they say (and based on the replies, it is true).

> Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Second sentence is empirically a complete lie.

Search volume is still growing, despite analysts asking on every call what Google is going to do about falling volume, and Google continuing to re-iterate: Search volume is still growing, as are clicks on ads.

I get it that everyone hates paying as much for clicks as they do now. You can hate it all you want. You can claim Google is lying about search volume and ads, but that would be massive securities fraud...

Haters gonna hate. It doesn't mean the king is dead.

can confirm; ive started getting advertisements explicitly meant for dentists

im very far from dentistry

Idk if I believe any analysis piece that has a separate paragraph for every sentence.

Gotta love seeing the complaint calling out "exact match (close variant)". Google sure does love text embeddings because it massively increases the keyword-search matches for auctions. After all these years, they definitely have no intention of fixing it for the advertisers.

Random anecdotes like this don't equate to "company juicing their numbers". You need much stronger evidence than that to make such an assertion. There are legal and financial ramifications for lying, companies are audited, there are official forms and documents that public companies must file. Of course a company can lie on those forms, but in the case of a company like Google you need extraordinary, factual evidence to make claims like "they've been juicing their numbers".

You basically have to say, everyone from the CEO/CFO, to the auditors, the financial analysts, the legal team, and all the way down are all lying and this random guy on Twitter is telling the truth. Sorry, not buying it.