Google search enshittified itself. We have evidence that at least some leaders with power inside google made search perform worse to increase ad revenue (if users search more, they see more ads).

There wasn't a better alternative, until LLMs came along. It will be some time until the wild west of LLM-SEO hacking settles into some semblence of a stable ecosystem, but even with misinformation and hallucinations today chatgpt far outperforms search engines for virtually everything we want search engines to do.

So google is under existential threat for the first time ever.

And they appear to be playing "all search is AI now, so you can't have one without the other."