alt Hacker NewsSame here. Even before AI, Google reduced my traffic all the time in favor of showing my competitors content, because they simply have a much larger footprint in the web as they started 5 years earlier. If you think about this twice, it means that the web (refereed to as Google search) is getting much less diversified, because Google acts as a positive funnel for already larger sites.
Doesn't have to be just larger sites. If someone launched their basic website 5 years before you did it's going to be difficult to outrank them.