Era of Agents: Will Google Lose Their Monopoly on Search?

Hey guys. Last time I talked about how the internet is changing and becoming agent-first. One of the big changes that comes with that is internet search.

Today you literally Google it: you open Google, type your query, scroll over the results, find whatever you need, and complete your action. Tomorrow it will be an agent doing that. An agent powered by some company’s LLM, maybe provided by yet another company, and these guys don’t want Google sitting in the middle. They want to take all the revenue for themselves.

And now we finally have some pretty big new players who can go after it: OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity. I’m not sure how big Perplexity really is, but it seems like they have enough funding to challenge Google. So for the first time in, I don’t know, the last 20 years, there’s a really decent chance that Google loses their monopoly on internet search. And that’s a good thing, because a monopoly is never healthy. Competition is always better than a single dominant player. That’s kind of an axiom.

Let me give you an example. I’ve been talking to a lot of small local trade businesses in the KW area, and I was surprised that more than five of them, out of over a hundred, were actually afraid to deal with Google. They have a Google Business Profile, but they’re scared to touch it. We found this out by accident. We told them, listen, your Google profile isn’t optimized, you don’t show up in the top results, we can easily improve it for you. And they said no, don’t touch it, don’t even think about touching it.

The reason is that they tried it in the past. They changed something trivial, something as stupid as their address on the profile, and Google banned them. Their business profile got blocked and stopped showing up in search until they appealed, the appeal was reviewed and confirmed, and the profile was restored. For some of them that took up to three months of sitting there with no customers, because most of their customers come through Google. When Google has the monopoly on search, that’s brutal for a local business.

So I think all of these small businesses will be happy to get rid of Google. And the new big players will be just as happy to take a larger piece of the pie. It’s a time of great opportunities. Whoever is into search optimization, or indexing, or building search APIs for agents, it won’t be easy, but these are definitely interesting times for you. Okay, that’s all I had to say. See you.