Why Google Search Is Dying, 2025 Edition

Last Wednesday, during Google’s ongoing antitrust trial, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services, testified that searches made through the Safari browser declined this April for the first time in history. He added, "This hasn’t happened even once in the past 22 years".

From The Verge’s article Google searches are falling in Safari for the first time ever — probably because of AI:

On the day his remarks became public, shares of Alphabet (GOOG), Google’s parent company, plunged 7.5%. In response, the company issued a statement stressing that overall usage of Google Search is still growing (author’s translation):

The statement simultaneously confirms that Cue’s testimony is accurate and tries to reassure shareholders that a decline in browser-based Google searches is not a big deal. Fewer people may be searching through the Safari browser, but they are supposedly searching more through the other channels mentioned. Google seems to view this as nothing more than the natural evolution of search. Just a few years ago, voice assistants capable of human-level conversation did not exist; today, Gemini interacts with users and delivers information with a remarkably high level of polish.

At the very least, Google does not appear to be lying. According to an analysis report published last month by Rand Fishkin, founder of SEO and audience research firm SparkToro, Google’s fortress-like dominance in search remains intact despite the rapid rise of AI search. The report estimates that Google’s search volume increased 21.64% between 2023 and 2024, which aligns with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s comment last year, when he launched AI Overviews, that users who see summarized information end up searching more.

Of course, the health of the internet ecosystem cannot be judged solely by the number of Google searches. More and more people are consuming AI-generated summaries from Google instead of visiting the original source websites, and this has reportedly reduced click-through rates by roughly 70–80% compared with impressions. Inevitably, this is dealing meaningful damage to the businesses of information providers. In 2025 alone, news media companies such as CNN, Vox Media, HuffPost, and NBC have announced restructuring plans.

Even though Eddy Cue’s testimony sent Alphabet’s share price tumbling, various data points suggest that Google Search’s grip on the market has become far stronger than before. More people are searching and receiving information through Google, and instead of clicking away to external platforms from the results page, they are spending more time staying within Google’s ecosystem.

Below is a summary of the final post uploaded by the head of the independent outlet Giant Freakin Robot, titled “The End of Independent Publishing and Giant Freakin Robot”:

GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT (GFR) rebuilt its site in 2019 and grew to more than 20 million monthly readers, but starting in 2022 its traffic plummeted due to changes in Google’s search algorithm, and it has now collapsed to just a few thousand monthly visitors. This is the result of Google designing its search algorithm to favor large brands and corporations, and most independent outlets—not just GFR—have suffered the same blow.

The author personally visited Google’s headquarters to raise the issue, but Google repeatedly insisted there was no technical problem and showed no willingness to improve things for independent publishers. In particular, Google effectively admitted that it prioritizes the interests of advertisers and big brands over fair search by taking the position that "big-name brands might get angry if they don’t appear at the top of search results".

Even when GFR tried new content strategies multiple times and briefly managed to boost traffic, Google would immediately slap a shadowban on the site and push traffic back down, and this pattern kept repeating. Especially after September 2024, the outlet concluded that recovery was impossible, as it had been effectively blocked across most major platforms, including Google.

As a result, GFR decided to stop publishing new articles on its website and scale back operations to prevent further losses. Its YouTube channel, however, is still growing and is expected to become the main focus of its future activities.

The decline of independent media is not just an algorithm problem; it is the outcome of legacy media and hedge funds working hand in hand to gradually erode the openness and diversity of the internet. Many independent outlets are disappearing quietly, and those that remain are likely to follow the same path before long.

Let’s revisit an article I first published in February 2022 and updated with my thoughts in October 2024.

In that piece, I described how English-speaking users have started adding the word “Reddit” to their Google search queries in order to find more “authentic” information, and warned that Google could lose its edge because it must simultaneously satisfy two conflicting goals: delivering accurate information to users and keeping advertisers happy. I then proposed the following thesis:

We need to recognize that Google is not an information provider or a content creator. By using AI to aggregate and summarize already known information and creators’ original content, Google has once again put itself back on a growth trajectory, and its grip on users has become even stronger than before.

Now, most search users have no reason to leave the Google platform. But as the GFR case shows, participants in the Google ecosystem are slowly dying because of this. In the end, the future of Google Search will be progressively less authentic and more skewed toward the interests of advertisers in the results it serves to users. For a while, this shift will be hard to feel. There is still an abundance of information and content for people to consume, and many are still trading it away in exchange for exposure on Google.

Google may already be accelerating toward a predetermined death.