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Google’s Future: The Threat to Businesses

For companies that might have been hoping that somehow good ol’ Google might be holding firm against the tide of AI-enabled search, the company’s latest moves should definitively put an end to that line of wishful thinking. Google has been undergoing severe threats from LLMs such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search platforms, which have been siphoning users from traditional search and transforming their behavior. This directly harms Google’s top money generator, advertising—after all, if nobody is consulting traditional search, they certainly aren’t clicking on the ads that would appear beside regular search results.

In similar existential crises, many once-powerful businesses have fumbled themselves into irrelevance by refusing to adapt. Google clearly doesn’t mean to be one of those cautionary tales.Their latest moves signal that they are fully committed to providing their own AI-powered search experience, and while that is good news for users who prefer the intuitive process of getting summarized information from multiple data sources in response to natural-language queries, it may not be for businesses that have thus far failed to gain online traction in today’s new search environment.

How Google Is Leaning into AI

Logan Kilpatrick, Google’s lead product manager, created a buzz on Friday, September 5^th when he responded to a post on X by suggesting that the search platform’s AI Mode would soon become the default rather than an option offered alongside the traditional search window. Two days later, in another reply on X, Google VP Robby Stein cautioned against reading too much into Kilpatrick’s statement, saying instead that the company was focusing on making AI mode easier to access. Did Kilpatrick jump the gun on announcing plans that were meant to be under wraps a bit longer, or was it just a moment of personal enthusiasm for the idea giving life to rumors? It probably doesn’t matter, because bigger moves at the company demonstrate how thoroughly committed they are to developing and promoting AI Mode.

In late August 2025, Google rolled out AI Mode in 180 countries and regions in English. Then, on September 8^th, they further announced that AI Mode would support five additional languages worldwide (Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese). AI Mode supports search via text, voice, or images using multimodal capabilities, and uses a “query fan-out” technique that runs multiple related searches across subtopics to synthesize a response. Per the company, this technique gives searchers “more breadth and depth of information than a traditional search on Google.”

This emphasis on AI Mode does not mean that Google is giving up on ad revenue. The company is experimenting with ad placement in AI Mode results and is expected to scale up its efforts in advance of the holiday season. But the change to AI-generated results means that ad targeting and placement will now rely on the full context of the search rather than just keywords, and it remains to be seen if users will respond to and interact with these ads the way they previously did with ads placed in traditional search results. And this move, as much as the other signs, shows the extent to which Google sees AI-enabled search as the future—otherwise, they might not be as eager to quickly monetize advertising in this context.

Will Change Be a Threat or an Opportunity for Your Business?

As we have noted before, businesses that have not begun to make moves to level up their digital marketing strategies for AI are already seeing the negative effects of relying on old techniques. If LLMs are mediating what users see online (and they are), then your content must be created not to land a top spot on a traditional list, but to provide unique, valuable information for your ideal audience that is more likely to be included in AI-generated search results. But even that will not be enough if your site does not meet the technical requirements that allow your pages to found and properly indexed by Google Search.

Adaptation and experimentation are the factors that are currently separating the businesses that are staying ahead of the curve from those that are losing visibility and market share. At Iffel International, we have been innovating and experimenting to keep our clients in the former group, and we foresee more changes that will require further adaptation in the months and probably years ahead as AI-enabled search becomes more firmly entrenched. To us, that is not a problem—it is an opportunity.

If the cascade of changes introduced by AI-enabled search has left your previous digital marketing strategy adrift and sinking fast, we can help right the ship. To schedule your consultation, contact us here today.

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