Google is dead. Where do we go now?

I recently took someone to go and watch a hockey game. Been a little while but I personally played as a goalie myself.

The person kept making the comment that she couldn't see/find the puck and it made it frustrating to watch.

As a goalie, not being able to see the puck is pretty normal (especially with big bodies trying to screen you).

What I told her was that what matters a lot more than where the puck is, is where it's going to be in about two seconds. But the next best thing is to know where the puck is now.

If you can't see the puck then look at the players and as a last resort, look at the ref. 99% of the time they will be looking at the puck. Look where they're looking and soon enough it will appear.

I think this applies very much to this whole Google question.

The puck is gone (or on the way to the other side of the rink) and everyone is confused where it is or where it's going.

Look where everyone is looking and you'll find your answer there. It may not be in the same form as Google adwords, but the game is the same. Leveraging attention.

The tactics were different during the phonebook days (it was having your business start with the letter "A") as opposed to Google and will be different for the next thing as well.

From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots and vertical, shortform video. Not sure how that plays out in terms of advertising, but in terms of the answer to this article's question, that seems like a good place to start.

I think the author intended the title to be,

"Google Ads is dead, Where do I promote my business now?"

When I hear "Google" I assume search, oof (sigh of relief).

They mention running ads on tiktok or instagram but no mention of youtube ads...

Also, In my own experience for my business ( also entertainment) I have found reddit ads to be useful.

So my next steps would be,

  Reddit Ads
  Youtube Ads
  Instagram Ads
  Increase AI Visiblity

Surprised to see this upvoted because the takeaway is completely incorrect, and based on the anecdotal evidence of one advertiser.

As someone who spends seven figures every month on Google ads, what’s much more likely to be happening here is that the individual advertiser is either getting outcompeted or they’re executing ads poorly.

Google ads revenue in the US continues to grow every quarter. And, since advertisers will generally invest in ads until the last dollar is break even, it’s likely that the total value advertisers unlock through Google ads is growing as well. Whether that’s true or not, the notion that value generated for advertisers is “dead” is absurd.

I love knocking on Google, and have been doing so for longer than it was cool, but this sounds more like the business is no longer attractive than Google having become suddenly wildly ineffective.

My anecdotal evidence is the smarter normies are increasingly allergic to screens. They only use them to watch stuff they hear about by some other means, but parents, for example, look for any excuse to keep their kids off the Internet, and largely they're better for it.

The web is dead, we replaced with portable cable TV where you scroll up to change channel.

The way people get information online is changing rapidly.

I run a local makerspace. It is not quite the same thing as a local entertainment business, but there are certainly some similarities. We are local, and we are very event-based.

For the last 10 years, the way we would get new members was to host Meetups. Meetups are slowly bringing in fewer members. When I ask tour guests how they found out about us, they recently started saying that they found us on ChatGPT. They did not know what a makerspace was but they explained their problem and ChatGPT presented our space as a local solution. This has been good for us because we offer something useful to the community but struggle to explain it. In the old days of search, this was a problem because many people were not using the correct phrase to describe what we are. That doesn’t matter anymore.

How does a local business optimize for this though? I am not sure.

Push advertising sucks, but we can make pull much better by giving the user more control.

Imagine a protocol to publish commercial offers for any given fragment of content addressable by URI. It would describe the details of some product or service and a set of proposed terms. We could surf the web looking for relevant content and publishing related offers. Various repositories would subscribe or not.

A browser (extension or native) would optionally pull offers from selected repositories and have UI for the user to solicit/pull offers for any given piece of content styled to signal their existence, and to filter and sort them. To make it sustainable there needs to be revenue sharing with the content source(s).

Are there existing projects like this?

The same protocol could be used for independent commentary and other annotation.

I think Google’s search and ad business are at risk. Search has become such a mess that it’s become harder and harder to use to find quality results. It reminds me of Yahoo before Google in a way.

I’m using ChatCPT or equivalent for 60% of my searches. The remaining 40% is just muscle memory. Of that 40% about half the time I regret using Google search due to the difficulty of finding the relevant result.

I can see search users moving to ChatGPT or such and Googles Ad business suffering as a result and a general downward spiral of Google search.

Is this being on top of HN part of the writer's new non-google marketing strategy?

A blog post lamenting the demise of Google Adwords.

Most people now conduct searches through AI chat. We never trusted Google with our search terms, IP address linked to WiFi and cell towers surveys with Google trucks for cross referencing on Google map, browser fingerprinting, time of day pattern detection, mouse reaction time measurement for age estimation, cross referencing with economic profiling of neighbourhoods, income bracket estimation algorithms, interest profiling based on search terms, browsing breadcrumbs, social network tracking, etc. Now imagine the new powers of AI chat adding reasoning patterns, deep thinking and complete trust to the equation. Let us organise a disconnect day where you turn off your phone and Internet router and ISP box just to confuse the algorithms! Where do we go from here? We stay home and invite disconnected friends for a rare moment of statistically insignificant privacy.

> I am AI assisted, very fast!

I sometimes think people really don't understand the value-add of AI (and I say this as someone on the less hyperbolic end of the "AI-hype" spectrum). If your service to me can be accomplished by AI "very fast"... I don't need you anymore. AI provides a generic problem solving interface where non-experts can leverage the power of the AI to solve a task they previously couldn't have so long as they can describe it well.

I've had multiple cases at work or other places where I've been presented with something as the stakeholder and been told "I used AI to make this!" Great! Next time I'll use AI to make it and save myself the overhead/cost of having work with someone else. I don't see a lot of value in explaining a problem to you so that you can then re-explain it to an LLM.

When people show me they've used AI to complete a task I used to have to do I'm delighted, and, more often then not, proven my value when they come back weeks later asking for help untangling the mess they've made. But, I'm equally delighted in the cases where they are successful using AI to replace things I used to be tasked with. Despite the AI hype, I find myself busier than ever.

Googles ad business is riddled with fraud in all levels.

Google profits directly from the fraud. It has no incentive to reduce it and is embarrassed by its extent.

Google is essentially overseeing a huge criminal enterprise which funds its other activities. It’s been well documented for over a decade and no one seems to care.

The traffic is faked, the publishers are faked, the clicks are faked and the ad rates are manipulated.

It’s an incredibly lucrative way to steal money with extremely low risk and trivial penalties. The victims are the advertisers. Google has no interest in rocking the boat while they get paid.

The effective ads via Google platforms are like the percentage of real drugs in what’s bought off the street. Coincidental and ever being shaved.

Might this not also be the fact that given the cost of living the world over, being able to afford a fancy party with entertainment like the poster provides is a luxury few can afford now? We used to eat out a lot more (Saturday lunch at a cafe I mean) and also used to get HelloFresh and other such services, but as the cost of them has gone up way faster than our salaries, we've had to reign them all back. I agree with the "Google is dying" sentiment for sure, but I also wonder how much is just being unable to afford nice things anymore.

It’ not Google that’s dead. It’s the economy in North American markets. I am finding conversion way down, clicks and impressions I’m still getting. People are just being way more fussy before handing over cash.

Everyone i talk to is quoting the same time line, this started in September and it hasn’t returned to normal.

Winter is coming.

Please go anywhere but the platforms I use. Go fill Tiktok up with ads. Any of the "mainstream" platforms inbuilt ad posts are a good bet. Or a marketing agency that will disguse it as organic content.

Reminds me of a quote I once read of "marketing being a game of diminishing returns".

When you find a working marketing solution, it's just a matter of time when it dries out, because of competitors and overall saturation.

They recently changed the max results per page from 100 to 10 and they're suing serpapi. They've basically killed their google newspaper archive.

Not happy with google.

And it's become clear to me how little of the open web, and top 100k sites they've fully indexed, I used to have a lot more faith in them.

I don't know if Google is dead, but what I know is this:

For the first time since 1995 my default method to research information on the web does not involve any traditional search engine anymore.

I can't find it, but there's a good graph that shows Google search decline in share to GPT, but it excludes Gemini. With Gemini, it stays relatively on par. That's pretty much the answer with where one goes. LLMs are higher intent than search could ever be, and they are closer to you selling to yourself than a store selling to you since they have all of your user context

If you believe markets to be a future discounting mechanism, then they're sure as hell saying Google "figured something out" in the last year, even vs OpenAI [1]

[1] https://x.com/firstadopter/status/1993464859376468102/photo/...

Just trying to find out what this guy actually does is hard. It’s a page of links linking to another page of links, repeat. Where is the thing? The content? The product? It just feels a bit disconnected from patterns users expect and delivery mechanisms users are comfortable with in 2025. It’s almost a 1995 style pastiche of intent with no payoff.

The old decentralized Internet is dying out and being replaced by a few apps under the total control of a few companies.

I'm not sure much can be done about this. At least the physical world is still the same.

Hugged to death right now, therefore: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229204141/https://www.circu...

Oh no, adtech is dying. I guess we'll all have to compete through quality of products and services and not gaming a rigged system designed to reward anything that maximizes the profit of the global surveillance adtech machine.

This gives me warm fuzzy feelings. It's nowhere near good, but this is better than it was.

Isn’t it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the guise of authority?

ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money.

Soak it up because it won’t last long.

Seriously, one random website getting less traffic means "Google is dead"? I imagine if you hit your toe, you call it "end of the world"? This sort of posts should be illegal. Flagged.

Your business seems well suited to advertising through short form content so I wish you lots of success with transitioning away from Adwords.

“Google is dead” feels overstated. What is actually breaking is the click based retrieval and attribution model once answers start getting synthesized upstream.

When discovery is mediated by LLMs, ranking a page is no longer sufficient because the system is not choosing a single best document. It is assembling an answer from spans that fit its internal representation of the problem, which quietly invalidates many of the assumptions SEO and ads were built on.

You can see this shift in the kinds of services being offered now. Instead of focusing on links, keywords, or bid optimization, teams are spending time on structured content that breaks cleanly into answerable fragments, on entity relationships and schema that make concepts legible to models, and on persona driven content that anticipates how questions will be interpreted rather than how pages will rank.

Measurement is shifting as well. Instead of impressions and clicks, people are running prompt level tests, checking whether their content shows up across different models, and tracking inclusion and citation patterns rather than traffic. In many cases, strong traditional pages disappear entirely from answers while smaller, better structured sources surface.

From the outside this looks like traffic declining. Internally it feels more like a loss of observability, where you cannot tell whether you were excluded, partially used, or summarized away into latent knowledge.

Google will likely face the same issue as AI Mode expands. Generating answers is not the hard part. Defining what visibility means when the retrieval layer is no longer exposed is.

Googles Search Ad revenue is dead, but the business is diversified and positioned for change. As of 2024:

Search Ads and Partner Revenue = 230bn Youtube = 36bn Cloud = 40bn

Say they drop 100bn on search revenue. How well are they positioned to convert their user platform and search crawling infrastructure onto Gemini, and introduce an advertising platform into LLMs to replace what they had? I imagine they are as well positioned as OpenAI.

I would lose a lot of sleep if I paid out for puts on them.

Such thick tension in the air waiting for the first courageous company to place ads on their LLM chats and tools.

They can spare their ad income falling for a while, but making the first move is always risky. Should they let openAI go first and fail?

Where do you go now? You go make sure LLMs know about your site, you welcome the herds of bot crawlers and pray someone breaks the standstill before your business falters.

Watching other people use Google, the predominant method of searching for information involves a query followed by getting their answer from the AI summary that appears above any search results.

I'm not sure what impact this would be having on Adwords, but another commenter mentions that Google isn't hurting in the ad revenue department.

This post and these comments give me low confidence in our HN community. No one here seems to understand ad platforms.

Google is far from dead. It still has the majority of the world’s online ad revenue, with Microsoft coming in second, then Meta at a far third. People assume that TikTok and Insta _must_ have the most since they assume that’s what all of their friends use, but even though they’re growing, they’re still not there yet.

Video ads on YouTube and others have a lot of play also, and everyone thinks of the TV commercials played during the Super Bowl.

But Google is still f-ing everywhere.

It’s fine to call them dying, but are they really when they are best positioned for ads in AI? OpenAI or Anthropic don’t have the data about users that Google has. There’s a reason that Buffett invested in Alphabet recently.

The real story isn't that Google Ads stopped working, it's that attention moved somewhere ads can't follow. You can't buy placement in a Discord server or an iMessage group chat. If this is the new normal, the entire ad-supported internet is running on borrowed time.

I know very little about online marketing, but my Googler marketing friend told me that just 6 months ago everybody would Google search three word terms: “best Chinatown dumpling”

But now people Google search: “my boyfriend is coming to town for the holidays and we are going to Chinatown and I want to have delicious dumplings with him because it was what we had on our first date, where should we go?”

So he now works to sell AdWords properly in that environment. I am wondering how or if OP took that into account with their new spend. What are other people doing?

I’ve also heard (probably via post+comments here on HN) that the new SEO is making tons of AI slop info pages on the site, not for humans but for AI crawlers to slurp, and then refer from prompts.

The AdWords platform is extremely complicated nowadays, and try as I might I can’t get any impressions from it. I then went through a period with an AdWords specialist from their team who also couldn’t get any impressions. It’s like they don’t want or need my money.

Chegg’s decline is a concrete example of how AI search is changing the web

There’s been a lot of debate about whether Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are actually harming publishers. One publicly traded company’s timeline is worth looking at: Chegg.

What happened (with sources):

2021: Chegg launched Uversity, a platform for educators to share academic content. (Wikipedia)

2023: ChatGPT emerged as a serious competitor in homework help. Chegg responded by launching CheggMate, its own AI product built on OpenAI’s models. (Wikipedia)

Late 2024: Chegg reported accelerating subscriber declines, widely attributed to users shifting to free AI tools instead of paid study platforms. (WSJ, company filings)

Feb 2025: Chegg sued Google, alleging that AI Overviews reduced traffic to Chegg by answering questions directly in search results, harming acquisition and revenue. (Search Engine Land, Reuters)

May 2025: Chegg laid off ~22% of its workforce (≈248 employees), citing competitive pressure from AI and changes in search behavior. (Reuters)

Oct 2025: Chegg announced another round of layoffs (~45%, ≈388 employees), explicitly referencing “the new realities of AI” and reduced traffic from Google to content publishers. (Reuters / SF Chronicle)

What the data suggests (more broadly):

Independent studies show that when Google AI Overviews appear, users are significantly less likely to click through to external sites.

“Zero-click” searches (where users get answers directly on the results page) have increased, especially for informational and educational queries.

The impact isn’t uniform — some publishers report minimal effects — but content that answers how-to, homework, or factual queries appears most exposed.

Why this matters:

Chegg isn’t a small blog or SEO-driven site. It’s a public company with audited financials, legal disclosures, and incentives not to exaggerate under scrutiny. Its filings and lawsuit don’t claim AI is “bad” — they claim that traffic flows are structurally changing.

This doesn’t prove AI search is “killing the web,” but it does show:

AI answers are substituting clicks, not just competing for them.

Entire business models built on informational content are under pressure.

“Build better content” may not be sufficient when answers are synthesized upstream.

Curious how others here see it:

Is this a temporary transition problem?

Or are we watching the unbundling of the open web’s traffic economy in real time?

Reminds me of the whale oil business being replaced by petroleum. Except the ad-based economy was effectively a google monopsony. I'm surprised the OP managed to make ad revenue for a decade, but to me at always seemed about casino-ish and snake-oily. A decade is impressive but I think we all knew where this was going. I think the question is: will another monopsony for ads arise or will it be content based only? It seems YouTUbe is poised to be the next google since more people watch YouTube than cable, so the audience is captive since there's no alternative (yes I realize Google owns YouTube). But that's still a parasitic economy sucking from google. "Where to go now?" depends on if another ad server can gain dominance, otherwise the answer is "nowhere".

Google is not dead in this case; what is dead is Ads on top of Google. I think the best way to fix this is to ensure that your website is optimized for searches in Google and in the new AI world.

Google Ads started charging me $5 per click on low traffic search keywords this week, meanwhile YouTube ads are still 20 cents a click (presumably to keep up with Meta)

They're having a laugh if they think we'll keep paying that for no actual leads.

The very concept of people going to a private digital plaza was very problematic in the first place and arguably still is. Humanity's drive towards convenience is the source of marvels but also many ills imo. Google's decline is a chance for change. Change towards something better. Not that I am optimistic that we will get there imo but the opportunity window is opening now. Don't look for a new digital overlord. Embrace the new age

Google has drowned in irrelevance for me. I barely use it (i use DuckDuckGo), and it has massively de-indexed my websites for no apparent reason. I don't even bother to look at Google Search Console

Logged on to say Kagi[1]

[1]not an employee, sponsor, or autonomous agent of the above company

I think it's time for a new way of discovering products. My ideal would be some sort of site that I can go to, to find services and products in my local area. There could also be national and international sections, with user ranked news of new interesting products in given categories.

For example, with video games I can go to sites like www.rockpapershotgun.com or others, or forums related to games, to see what the new products coming out. That's perfect in my world. No ads in my search, no ads in my email, no ads in youtube or whatever. But when I'm interested in seeing what's new, I can, on my terms, go and check out the new products.

Anecdotally, this article seems to match with what I am witnessing regarding browsing habits. I am planning a big trip with others and everything is being found via social media apps; destination ideas, experiences, cafes, accommodation, etc.

You’re definitely not alone in this, I’ve seen similar drops from Google Ads recently. It feels less like bad optimization and more like the ground shifting under everyone.

Is this really about Tiktok or about AI and how people are consuming the web? Used to be all web, then web+Tiktok,etc, now only AI+Tiktok, etc? I think I go to normal websites way less than I used to. Maybe everyone is doing that?

I'm not a marketer (anymore), but as an end user, I feel that Google has shot themselves in the foot with the horrendous search experience they provide these days. This notion and topic of discussion is becoming more commonplace online.

"Google results are just AI and sponsored content anymore." We've all seen it.

“Research shows” Lool!! Ask anyone in their teens or 20s even 30s. They’ll all answer what you did in the article. Short attention spans are ruling and so are those social media applications you mentioned.

> I am AI assisted, very fast!

This feels like one of the most surreal things I have read in a while, believing that the blog is authentically written by a real person. I can't put my finger on why.

I do feel like it's maybe time to rewatch BSG.