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.