Stop betting against Google, here's why
Every few years, the tech world anoints a new “Google Killer.” The media hypes it, investors flock to it, and everyone predicts Google’s impending demise.
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Every few years, the tech world anoints a new “Google Killer.” The media hypes it, investors flock to it, and everyone predicts Google’s impending demise. From privacy-focused engines (DuckDuckGo) and subscription-based search (Neeva) to the new wave of AI-native answer engines, the narrative is always the same: Google has lost sight of the future.
Each time, the anointed challenger never seems to fulfill its potential, which is less a reflection on their innovation and more a testament to the sheer, compounding force of Google’s dominance.
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Google’s reign isn't just about legacy or luck; it’s the most successful product-led strategy ever executed. Its defenses are built on interconnected moats that every competitor, including its big tech peers Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, can’t traverse.
The rise of OpenAI certainly feels like the closest there has ever been to a Google killer, but I am skeptical that this narrative, too, won’t fizzle out. For the record, I don’t at all believe that OpenAI will not become one of the most powerful and successful tech companies; I am just doubtful that it will disrupt Google’s dominance of consumer search anytime soon.
Data on everything and everyone
At the heart of Google's power is a frankly scary data feedback loop. It’s not just about having more data; it’s the flywheel that this data powers.
Billions of searches lead to unparalleled data ingestion, where each query, click, and refinement provides a signal about user intent and result quality. In turn, this data feeds a sprawling ecosystem of algorithms, from core ranking systems to AI models that learn and improve with every interaction.
The refined algorithms deliver more relevant and context-aware search results (even without enabling context in search). This superior product quality reinforces user preference for Google and attracts new users, bringing the process back to the beginning and spinning the flywheel ever faster.
Any new search engine faces the "cold start" problem - even one seemingly as good as SearchGPT lacks the decades of nuanced, real-world user interaction data that Google possesses. This is Google’s core competitive moat. Using their entire ecosystem, Google solves for the next layer of semantic nuance. This data supremacy allows them to roll out features like AI Mode with a level of confidence that all startups, with their limited datasets, cannot match.
Ecosystem
Google’s true power isn’t just the search engine; it's the ecosystem built around it. Think of all the Google touchpoints from YouTube to Google Analytics, Chrome, Waymo, and wearables. Whenever I meet a tech-forward thinker who predicts Google’s demise because THEY no longer use Google search, I ask them if they use Chrome, Gmail, and Google’s other Workspace products like Sheets and Slides. Of course they do. Some of them even use Android devices.
Google is a masterclass in product-led growth, where each product serves as an acquisition, engagement, and retention channel for the others. The "switching costs" are too high, especially for people with years of data in these products.
Even if someone does not use Gmail, Chrome, or Google Maps, are they so anti-Google that they would refuse to access a Google doc, slide, or sheet? Likely not. Similarly, do they insist on only watching video clips on TikTok or Instagram, avoiding YouTube like the plague?
Leaving Google doesn't just mean changing a default setting. It means untangling a decade of your digital life from a seamlessly integrated system. It means actively boycotting the dozens of products everyone around you uses. This ecosystem creates a tough gravitational pull that ensures user retention even if a competitor momentarily offers a marginally better feature in one particular category.
If Google thinks its ad revenue model and category dominance are threatened, it will become ever more aggressive at driving users from all those other touchpoints users cannot avoid.
Search quality
Google’s relentless focus on understanding the intent behind a query, rather than just matching keywords, remains its crowning achievement. The journey from the keyword-stuffing era to today’s semantic search is a direct result of sustained, long-term research and development.
Other search tangential products will invest their resources into models that perform better for their enterprise customers. Google’s primary customer is the individual consumer, and satisfying that individual consumer requires that Google make every search perfect.
AI models understand context, nuance, and ambiguity. When a user searches for "best place to travel on the Juneteenth federal holiday," Google doesn't just look for those keywords. It understands the concepts of "drive time (from Google maps)," "tourist density (from Google Places reviews and active visits to these places)" and past search history (Google search)," and cross-references them with data from the web and user reviews to provide a genuinely valuable answer.
New AI answer engines are impressive but often operate as a conversational layer over a less sophisticated and much less robust search index. Google, by contrast, is integrating its generative AI directly with its core search index. This index is a library of the web that has been crawled, indexed, and improved for over two decades. Integrating a mature index with their proprietary AI layer is a technical advantage that will be difficult to replicate.
Marrying that product with the personal context Google has on each user from years or decades of Google interactions is as big a competitive moat as you can ever build.
Capital
Innovation at Google’s scale requires a staggering amount of capital. Google’s financial strength allows it to invest billions annually in areas foundational to its dominance. Google doesn't just buy servers; it designs its own custom hardware, optimized for AI.
This provides a performance and cost advantage in training the massive models that power modern search. Google Search's speed and reliability are direct functions of a global network of data centers that no startup can afford to build. Moreover, Google can attract and retain the world’s leading AI researchers and engineers, whilst others (excluding OpenAI) cannot.
While a venture-backed competitor might raise a few million dollars to great fanfare, Google can spend that amount on R&D in a single day without blinking. This financial moat allows it to make bets that dwarf the funding rounds of most companies.
OpenAI and undoubtedly others will raise unfathomable amounts of money to fund their ideas, but Google already has that cash. Capital alone can’t win this battle because if it were, Bing, with its billions spent and its own ecosystem (Windows, Edge, Office, and more), would have a greater search market share than its measly sub-5 %.
On that note, Microsoft has over 70% of market share of desktops; yet the first thing many of those Windows users do is use their Microsoft Edge Browser to download Chrome, leading to Chrome’s 66% market share.
The real linchpin of Google’s success goes beyond product quality and falls squarely into consumer behavior, which is much harder to break, especially when Google continues to invest in its product quality to be at least as good as all of the new entrants into search.
Inertia
In a blind taste test between Bing and Google results, most people likely couldn’t identify which results belonged to which search engine. Search dominance isn’t a quality measure; it is pure inertia. People Google just because that’s what they do. It's a deeply ingrained habit.
For a competitor, this means they not only have to build a better product but also find a way to break both a user's habit and Google’s lucrative hold on the primary distribution channels.
In 2014, I ran a survey and discovered that DuckDuckGo had a 1% market share. In 2023/2024, when DuckDuckGo participated in the DOJ’s antitrust trial against Google, the world learned that DuckDuckGo had a 2% market share. That means that in 10 years, with tens of millions spent on advertising to acquire users, they had only increased by 1%.
Inertia is a powerful drug 😃.
This could change with Gen-Alpha (today’s Tweens), but that assumes Google doesn’t figure out how to reach them, too. Capital and ecosystem become tools to create that inertia. They may not be using the Internet the same way millennials or even Gen-Z do, but when they do, many of them are doing so on school-issued Chromebooks, made by Google.
Additionally, the price point of Android devices makes them far more attractive for parents to buy for their children as their first phones, and using an Android device without using any Google products is extraordinarily difficult. Gen-Alpha may eventually purchase or receive iOS devices, but those Google products are coming with them to their new devices.
(If you are a parent and considering how to teach your child how to engage in a screen-addicted world most effectively, check out my wife’s book Always On: An Interactive Parents' Guide to the (Dis)Connected Generation)
Don’t count out Google, yet
Google’s enduring dominance isn't magic: it's a strategic fortress with moats, secret backdoors, and most importantly, loyalty from its user base.
While search will fragment into more devices and mediums, most will still be powered by Google search. SEO will always exist as long as users are searching, but its practices will change.
SEO success will remain a result of understanding Google nuances, not by becoming an expert on “AEO” on a search product that will never achieve significant market share. Google may lose some market share to the new entrants, but it will always remain the most dominant for consumers.
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As a former Googler, I think this is a fair review of the situation! Google's advantage is its ecosystem, which has been facing growing competition these days (ie Perplexity, Notion, Amazon, Meta, etc). However, it is very capital intensive to build another ecosystem and that takes time. Overall I think Google is slower to market mainly because of its size, but also that it's more cautious when taking huge decision. On technology note, DeepMind is not lagging behind, and Google's quantum computing technology is still leading the market.
Hi Eli,
Thanks for sharing your valuable insights in this article. I found them very compelling, especially the point about habits. It reminded me of The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. Have you read it? The book explores how unpredictable events can completely reshape what we take for granted, which feels especially relevant in this era of AI disruption.
Even with all the data and patterns we rely on, the future can unfold in radically different ways. One unexpected shift whether in technology, behavior, or society can change everything, not instantly, but gradually and powerfully over time.