Everyone says “advertise!” Like it’s a magic bullet. The tech industry is littered with companies that have high traffic and couldn’t figure out how to monetize via advertising. Yahoo being the canonical example.

Besides the cost of serving an LLM request - using someone else’s infrastructure and someone else’s search engine is magnitudes higher than a Google search.

Besides defaults matter. Google is the default search engine for every mobile phone outside of China and the three browsers with the most market share