#CanGoogleDefindItsCore
Yes—so far Google is defending its core search-and-ads business, even as AI reshapes how people query the web.
Global search share remains around 90 percent, and Search advertising revenue has continued to grow in the mid-to-high teens year over year through 2026.
AI Overviews now appear on a large majority of queries (often cited above 80 percent for many categories), AI Mode has crossed one billion monthly users, and Gemini has scaled to roughly one billion monthly active users, yet overall query volume and engagement have held or increased rather than collapsed.
ChatGPT still leads pure chatbot traffic, but its absolute web visits have not displaced Google at scale; some measurements even show Google’s daily visits rising while pure AI-chat traffic remains a small fraction of total search activity.
The main pressures are higher compute costs for generative answers, reduced click-throughs to publishers, and ongoing regulatory scrutiny. Google is responding by embedding an agentic layer into Search so that chat, task completion, and classic results coexist rather than cannibalize one another.
In short, the distribution, data, and monetization advantages of Search have proven more durable than many expected, giving Google a strong position to defend its core while it integrates AI
Yes—so far Google is defending its core search-and-ads business, even as AI reshapes how people query the web.
Global search share remains around 90 percent, and Search advertising revenue has continued to grow in the mid-to-high teens year over year through 2026.
AI Overviews now appear on a large majority of queries (often cited above 80 percent for many categories), AI Mode has crossed one billion monthly users, and Gemini has scaled to roughly one billion monthly active users, yet overall query volume and engagement have held or increased rather than collapsed.
ChatGPT still leads pure chatbot traffic, but its absolute web visits have not displaced Google at scale; some measurements even show Google’s daily visits rising while pure AI-chat traffic remains a small fraction of total search activity.
The main pressures are higher compute costs for generative answers, reduced click-throughs to publishers, and ongoing regulatory scrutiny. Google is responding by embedding an agentic layer into Search so that chat, task completion, and classic results coexist rather than cannibalize one another.
In short, the distribution, data, and monetization advantages of Search have proven more durable than many expected, giving Google a strong position to defend its core while it integrates AI