Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440)

Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440)

November 21, 2024

Just a few months after its 26th anniversary, Google faces more threats heading into next year than ever. The rise of artificial intelligence provides users with an alternative way to search. Regulators, legislators, and courts are trying to break its market dominance. And younger consumers, especially, increasingly turn to social platforms to find the answers they need.

And, yet, in the midst of these threats… Google just had the most successful quarter in its history.

So, what’s the reality? Is Google doomed in 2025? Or is its continued position as king of the hill assured next year and beyond? Most importantly, how will whatever happens in the year ahead affect your business?

I don’t think Google is doomed, far from it. But I do think their most likely responses to the changing marketplace isn’t necessarily in your best interest. If nothing else, you should expect the ongoing shift from organic to paid search to continue. And there’s no way that’s good for you.

So, whether or not Google is doomed, what should you do as you move into 2025? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) — Headlines and Show Notes
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You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

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Transcript: Is Google Doomed in 2025?

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 440 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in.

I think we have a really, really cool show for you. I want to start by saying, A, this is a follow up to last week’s episode that looked at the future of computing and Big Tech’s earnings for Q3 of 2024. And what I didn’t do last week was spend much time talking about Google. With everything that’s going on with the world of artificial intelligence and the competition that Google is seeing from AI based startups and the like, the question that people keep asking me is, will next year be the end of Google?

And I want to get the big question out of the way right up front. There is no way that Google is dead by the end of 2025. And I don’t think it’s terribly likely that they are anything other than the dominant player by the end of next year. I’m not going to predict that SEO is dead. I will not predict that Google is dead. No way.

At the same time, I’m fairly certain that Google will be a vastly different company at the end of 2025 than they are today. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a decent amount of money that Google is not as dominant in your world by the end of next year as they are today. Let’s put this in terms that you can easily see.

Go to your website’s Google Analytics traffic acquisition report and change the duration that you’re looking at for the last 90 days or the last 12 months. You pick. It doesn’t matter to me. First, take a look at the total sessions you’ve received during the period you’re reviewing. Then, instead of just looking at the default view, which groups traffic by Session Primary Channel Group or something similar. Click the dropdown that shows Session Primary Channel Group, and change that to Session source/medium. Now, in the little search box after you do that, in the report, type "Google" and hit enter. This will show you how many sessions you’ve received during the selected period and, importantly, the percentage of traffic that Google, and especially Google/Organic, represents to your business. I want you to make a note of three numbers.

First, write down the number of sessions from Google/Organic. You can also note the total traffic from Google and its share of your total traffic. If you’re like most businesses, I’d expect Google’s overall share to be somewhere between 25 and 65% of your traffic, and Google Organic’s share probably to be no less than, say, 10 or 12%, and could be as high as 60%, depending on how much advertising you do or how much you rely on organic search.

I doubt it’s at the top end, though there are certainly edge cases where that could be true. The actual volume of traffic you get varies too widely by business and industry for me to hazard a guess at what the actual number will be. So right now I’m just talking in percentages. For my hospitality industry friends, keep in mind that traffic for Metasearch shows up under a different source/medium. It could be Sabre or Amadeus or Mirai or Siteminder or DerbySoft, ROIback, folks like that. We’re not going to worry about that traffic today.

Here’s the bet I’d be willing to make 12 months from now. The share of traffic that comes from Google/Organic will be down no less than 5 percent from where it is today, if not more. Your Google traffic overall and your Google/Organic traffic level might increase, but the share of organic traffic, that is, free traffic that you get from Google today, will almost certainly decline by the end of 2025. And I have four big reasons for thinking that Google will be a different company and that as a consequence, your organic traffic will decline.

The biggest is that Google needs to keep monetizing their search engine results pages. If your overall Google traffic goes up in the next year, It’s probably because you’ve traded some type of paid search, whether traditional CPC ads, metasearch, or something similar, For what is today free, organic search.

The second reason is because Google continues to increase the number of zero click search response pages. Those pages provide answers to customers and don’t drive clicks through to the sources of those answers. I’m really confident that will drive down the amount of organic traffic you get over the course of the next year.

The third reason that Google will be a vastly different company is what I started the show with. Google faces competitive challenges from alternative search engines and search experiences. One set of alternatives includes AI based options like ChatGPT’s new search feature and Anthropic’s Claude. Another is dedicated search engines like Perplexity and Bing. You have things like Apple Intelligence and iOS. And yet another alternative comes from consumers conducting more searches on social sites like TikTok or LinkedIn where we’re seeing a definite uptick, no pun intended — good thing because that’s a terrible pun — but we’re definitely seeing an uptick in that behavior.

And the fourth reason that Google is definitely going to change is that Google is facing some serious antitrust threats that might prevent them from responding as quickly as they traditionally have. Don’t misunderstand, I would be very surprised if their various antitrust cases wrap up by the end of 2025. I also don’t think that those cases will reach a conclusion that will force Google to change their business model or anything that we’ll talk about in a moment.

What I do think is true is that those cases will represent a distraction that will hurt Google’s ability to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace. It is awfully tough to run forwards when you’re looking over your shoulder with worry.

Now, before I address the first three reasons in more detail, I do want to spend a moment on Google’s antitrust situation. Remember, I’m not a lawyer. I could be stupendously wrong about what I’m about to say here. My sense, though, is that the antitrust thing is a big honking deal. It is, you know, huge. There are reports that the DOJ apparently wants to strip Chrome away from Google as part of its proposed remedies to the case. That’s a rumor at this point. We don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the kind of thing people are talking about. They’re talking about major substantive remedies, major substantive structural remedies to the way Google operates as a business. And that’s just the cases that Google faces in the U. S. Obviously, the UK’s Competition Markets Authority, EU regulations like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and lawsuits across an array of jurisdictions also affects the reality of how Google does business.

Sticking with just the U.S. for now, in any normal election year, you would expect that in an incoming Republican administration. would favor a hands off approach toward big business and that Google might be able to, you know, negotiate a settlement that’s favorable and quickly.

At the same time, this obviously is not a normal incoming Republican administration. Instead, they’re a highly populist one, and there’s plenty of evidence they’re no more fond of big tech than a typical Democratic administration might be. The consensus I’ve read from people who seem to know what they’re talking about is that the Trump administration isn’t going to simply walk away from this.

I’m going to read you a slightly lengthy quote for a moment here. This is a quote the speaker said, "I think my argument is actually even if you believe that there are network effects that make Google more powerful or make Gemini a more powerful tool within Google, There are actually some real, real issues here with just the integration. So does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all those other platforms that are built on top of or built underneath the Google umbrella?"

The speaker continued by saying, "I think there’s a really good argument that if we want to be pro innovation, we want to ensure that new insurgents can change these things up. That you want to promote as much competition as possible, and you actually want to separate all of those market verticals as much as possible. That’s where I think antitrust is probably the most useful way to think about a solution to what we face."

Would it shock you if I told you that that quote is from incoming Vice President JD Vance? That’s not the kind of rhetoric you typically hear. Would it further surprise you that Vance also said, "One final observation I’ll make just about this intersection between competition and innovation. If there’s a person within the Biden administration, obviously the FTC is an independent agency, but Lina Khan is the person that I would point to as the best person, in my view, within the Biden administration."

Now, Lina Khan is the person in charge of the FTC, and the FTC is the folks who’ve been going after Google in many cases. So, yeah, that’s not what you might typically expect.

Now, maybe the Trump administration will be more, well, let’s call it transactional, and Google can, for lack of a better term, "buy them off" by paying fines or God help us, making changes favorable to Trump’s policies or something. Trump’s rhetoric himself on the topic is decidedly mixed, so who knows, really? I’m going to link to a lot of this in the show notes. I do want to be fair, I’m not remotely going to make any bold predictions here, other to say that it seems unlikely that Google’s antitrust situation will simply go away without the company making some significant concessions or changes to how it does business. My confidence level on exactly what form those concessions and changes might take, I don’t And when they might occur, is pretty low. So, you know, take all of that with a grain of salt, but it does seem unlikely that those cases simply just, you know, vanish.

Turning back to my actual topic of expertise, which is the digital marketplace itself, there was a recent discussion at HospitalityNet and on LinkedIn about whether startups like ChatGPT and Perplexity pose a threat to Google.

First, there was no consensus among the panel of experts convened by HospitalityNet about whether or not others will beat Google. Personally, I lean towards Google continuing its dominance, at least in the intermediate term. If we return to last week’s look at big tech’s earnings, Google grew its revenues 15 percent year on year to $88.3 billion, and its profitability almost 34 percent to $26.3 billion. It was a record quarter for Google, both in revenues and in profits. The company is sitting on $97 billion in cash. They own one of the most powerful computing infrastructures in human history. They have one of the deepest pools of AI talent in the world.

There’s also some evidence, including articles in Reuters and The Information and on Bloomberg that improvement in new AI models is slowing down. In other words, it’s getting harder for AI companies to show improvement versus existing models like GPT 4.0 and Gemini.

If that slowdown holds true, success in the marketplace is not going to go to those with the most impressive model, because after all, the frontier models today are pretty good. You’re going to need to see dramatic improvement to separate yourself there.

Instead, success will belong to those who do the best job of providing a useful product. To their customers, and Google definitely has the edge there. Remember the revenue numbers I just said like 10 seconds ago? Google has an amazing existing revenue model that simply prints money. No disrespect to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude. But none of them today has a plan that makes anywhere near enough money as fast as they’re spending it. That’s not a formula for long term success.

So, you know, I’m not, I’m not bullish on Google maintaining its dominance necessarily because I think they’re the most innovative or because they’ve done the coolest things. I think they’re the ones that have the deepest pockets and the deepest pool of talent to keep turning to, as well as a model that already pays for itself.

That’s just going to be tough for folks to dislodge without a truly disruptive product. Obviously, if a new model comes out that, you know, blows up what we’ve seen to date, then all bets are off. But that doesn’t appear to be the direction we’re headed, at least at the moment. Barring any wildcards, I’m still going to put my chips on Google in this case.

Now, at the same time, Google must keep finding ways to monetize their search engine results pages. They’re not going to drive double digit growth year on year without it. And that’s not great for your business, because they’re continually converting formerly free traffic into something you pay for. That’s their right. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for you or your business in the long term.

Google keeps increasing the number of zero click search response pages, too. With its AI Overviews product, they’re giving customers answers without driving clicks to the sources of those answers. Again, that’s their right, but again, it’s not great for you or your business. Now, maybe customers will find that they prefer ChatGPT’s answers or Perplexity’s answers or Claude’s answers.

My question is, is that any better for you? I don’t think so. If they’re not linking to you, if they’re not driving traffic to you and driving clicks to you, that’s a problem for you.

And because of that, I want to go back to the bet I opened this episode with. I said I can pretty much guarantee you that your organic search numbers will decline. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead, by the way, it just means it’s going to be harder to drive traffic from those clicks where you used to get them.

And all of those reasons I just gave are the reasons I’m fairly comfortable making the bet that your organic traffic will decline. What I neglected to say, of course, was that you have more than a little control over what happens there. You don’t have to take that as a given. You don’t have to let anything bad happen to your business, even if Google’s position in the marketplace drops or they change how they’re routing traffic to you.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

I am absolutely, 100%, recommending that you take action, today, to make sure that nothing bad happens to your business.

As I said in my Hospitality Net panel response, who cares what happens to Google? The real question is whether those changes represent a threat to your business.

Now is the time for you to consider how to diversify your channel mix, the mix of business that comes to your website and drives traffic and revenue for you. You need to start by working to improve conversion rates when traffic arrives on your web and mobile channels. I know I’ve been talking to this point about traffic, but what happens when traffic shows up is even more important.

Assume, for instance, that your digital channels produce 100,000 per month in revenue. If your current conversion rate is, say, 3%, even a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in that number equates to an extra 5,000 to 10,000 per month from the traffic already visiting your site. More importantly, it gets you more data about your customers that you can use to connect with them through other channels.

That’s also why you need to expand your horizons when talking about what conversions are on your website. For instance, conversion isn’t just a sale. It could be customers opting into your email list, or downloading a whitepaper, or following you on social media. Each of those has an economic value to you.

Imagine, for instance, that your average sale is 100. It could be 1,000, it could be 100,000 too. But for now, let’s make it a hundred bucks. Consider that maybe 5% of all email addresses you collect will turn into a sale within a year or so. That is what we tend to see at a minimum over time. That means that every email address is worth at least $5 to your business in future revenue. Even a social media follow is worth a buck if 1% of those folks turn into a sale over time, too. There’s tremendous long term value in turning your traffic into connections who can later come back and buy from you. So you want to put some focus there. And those conversion events increase the return on spend from your paid media activities, too. So it’s a win on that level also.

And, of course, email and social can then become a larger share of your traffic over the long term so that you’re less dependent on Google. It’s a win on every single part of the scoreboard.

Next, you want to think about the core and explore method that I’ve talked about before and will link to in the show notes so you can check it out. But put most of your efforts, maybe 80 to 90%, into core activities that drive the majority of your traffic and revenues today. So that could be things like content marketing, that could be things like SEO, that could be things like paid search. At the same time, you’re going to use the remaining 10-20% of your time and your energy and your budget to explore new opportunities. Those could be referrals from influencers or creators. It could be testing a new social platform or content campaign, something you haven’t done before. The idea is to try to improve your overall traffic and revenue from new sources and diversify the mix of sources driving traffic and revenue to your business.

One place you’re going to want to start exploring in 2025 is ranking in these alternative AI search engines as well. You can ensure you show up the places that your customers are starting to test so that if, in fact, people do switch to ChatGPT or do switch to Perplexity, you’ve got a shot at capturing those customers as well.

I’m already seeing clients getting small numbers of visits from those channels. And in my own case, we’re getting a very small but growing number of visitors each month from Perplexity, from ChatGPT, and from Microsoft Copilot. None are huge yet, but it’s a start. And it’s a sign that we’re doing the necessary things to capture customers who are making a switch.

Now the best part of taking an approach like this is that these actions ensure you win whether Google stumbles or whether it continues as the market leader. If Google makes changes that impact your traffic, you’re already working to offset those declines. If Google gets beaten in the marketplace by an AI startup or its antitrust challenges kick it in the butt, again, you’re already working to offset those declines.

And if they maintain their dominant position, you’re still growing your traffic and revenue from no sources. That’s a formula for success in any case, and it’s the place you want to be.

So I want to go back to where I started. I cannot see any way that Google is dead by the end of 2025. Next year will not be the end of Google. I still think, though, that they’re going to be a vastly different company at the end of 2025 than they are today.

If you assume that Google’s share of your traffic, and certainly your share of unpaid traffic, is going to decline, and assume that Google’s going to be okay with that, then the right activity today is to take actions now that diversify the sources driving your traffic.

Position yourself to win no matter what happens to Google. Ultimately, that’s a bet you should be willing to make. And if you take the right actions now, Google. A bet you’re almost certain to win.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 440.

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Show Outro

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

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