Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd at Google’s annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen AFP | Getty Images
More than three years have passed since the generative artificial intelligence boom began. google ChatGPT has betrayed many skeptics who thought it would spell the end for the search giant. However, cracks are appearing in the core business.
Search engine DuckDuckGo is seeing install rates increase by up to 40% per week. microsoft’s Bing reached 1 billion users for the first time last quarter. Additionally, while Google’s search engine traffic has declined slightly over the past month, ChatGPT has been slowly increasing.
Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock has more than doubled in the past year, and its first quarter revenue growth was the fastest in any period since 2022. However, concerns about AI persist as more people turn to chatbots as their preferred method of tracking information. ChatGPT is consistently ranked as a top free app. apple On iOS, Anthropic’s Claude is currently in 8th place, one place behind Google Gemini.
Meanwhile, a new wave of internet users is moving away from AI-powered search altogether in favor of non-AI alternatives. A Pew Research Center study released in March found that about half of Americans feel “more anxious than excited” about AI in their daily lives. Navigating the internet without it is a coping mechanism, and earlier this month, DuckDuckGo created an “AI-free” search engine and released a new browser extension that lets users use noai.duckduckgo.com by default.
“A lot of people use Google because it’s like the home page of the internet, but they want to go on that journey and click and search and make their own decisions,” said Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimization and AI search at marketing firm Amsive.
Google is also considering the challenge of fending off heavily funded AI startups that are paying out large sums of money for talent ahead of future initial public offerings.
Last week, Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering and co-leader of Gemini AI, announced he was leaving Google to join OpenAI. And on Friday, DeepMind Vice President and Engineering Fellow John Jumper announced he was leaving the company to join Anthropic.
Alphabet stock fell 5% on Monday, its worst day in more than a year.
“We view the recent departures not as an indication that Google is reducing its AI efforts, but as another data point in an industry-wide talent war in which Frontier Labs is actively bidding,” Jefferies analysts said in a report.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story.
For Google, the emergence of generative AI represents something of an existential risk since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, which recently surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. The threat is both that Google loses its edge and that, in an attempt to compete with AI, it cannibalizes search in favor of new ways of finding information without proven digital advertising models.
Advertising still accounts for about three-quarters of the company’s revenue. Extremely high profit margins from advertising allow Google to spend nearly $200 billion on AI infrastructure while funding big-ticket long-term investments like Waymo and space-based AI.
Google announced at its annual developer conference last month that it would redesign its search box for the first time in 25 years, placing an “AI mode” button directly inside the box. A search button now appears below the box.
“This is the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago,” Elizabeth Reed, head of Google’s search organization, said at the event.
Additionally, Google’s popular image generator Nano Banana is also available in the search box by clicking the plus button. In the Google Search mobile app, the large “AI mode” click box is about the same size as the regular search box.
AI backlash
Over the past month, Google’s search engine traffic has declined by more than 1%, while ChatGPT traffic has increased slightly, Ahrefs said. DuckDuckGo, which has long positioned itself against Google as a more private search option, says its install rate is up 75% compared to before Google’s I/O announcement in May.
Google “needs to strike a balance because if you use too much AI, you lose users,” Amsiv’s Ray said. He called DuckDuckGo’s market share “marginal,” but said it has increased significantly in recent years.
Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recognizes the fear surrounding AI. On a recent episode of the Hard Fork podcast, Pichai said people are “understandably” anxious about what kind of future the technology will create, and said the scale of change is unprecedented.
Google and OpenAI are both facing wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of people who allegedly committed acts of violence or self-harm due to chatbot use. In March, Google was sued by the father of a 36-year-old man. The father claimed that the Gemini chatbot persuaded his son to attempt a “mass casualty attack” and ultimately drive him to commit suicide.
DuckDuckGo isn’t the only engine responding to the search market’s desire for alternatives. Microsoft announced a Bing browser extension called Bing AI Search Choice, giving users the option to turn off features like AI chat.
“AI is powerful in search, but research shows that not everyone wants to use it for everything all the time,” Jordi Rivas, Microsoft’s president of search and AI, wrote in a LinkedIn post about the update.
There’s also growing resentment among publishers who have seen their traffic tank from Google Search, in part because AI populates the summary at the top of results, eliminating the need to click through. In its antitrust battle with the Justice Department, Google acknowledged in a court filing last year that the open web was “already in rapid decline,” a recognition that contrasted with public comments from Google executives.
According to research from data panels such as SparkToro and Similarweb, approximately 68% of all Google searches currently end without a single click to an external website. Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch said in an interview with TBPN last month that his team had been predicting a decline in search traffic for three years, and “every year, search traffic has exceeded our expectations.”
“Last year, I told my team that we assumed there would be no investigation,” he said. “You need to plan your business as if there were zero searches.”
Even after Google’s decline on Monday, the company’s stock is still up more than 100% over the past year, significantly outperforming all of its hyperscaler peers. The company has demonstrated the ability to survive and grow through large-scale platform changes, particularly the transition from the web to smartphones, and has proven to be a major player in generative AI despite being a latecomer.
In the last earnings call, Pichai cited increased user engagement due to AI experiences such as AI Mode and AI Overview, which are key investment areas.
“AI continues to drive search usage, with query volumes at record highs,” Pichai said on the conference call.
However, Google automatically turns on AI Overview. This means, in the words of DuckDuckGo’s head of policy Kamil Bazbaz, that users are “not given a choice.”
“There’s kind of a myth that people want AI and the web,” Reid, Google’s search leader, said on a Bloomberg podcast in April.
“I think what we’re really seeing is that people want AI on the web together,” she said.
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