My insights into how Google could evolve in the next year, in line with AI making it easier for people to find what they want, including from outside the Google search system.
In the past year, we’ve seen Google scramble to hold onto its dominance as user behaviour shifts rapidly from traditional search to AI-driven answers.
The launch of AI Overviews, and more recently in the UK, Google’s AI Mode, is a clear sign of how much is at stake for the tech giant. What’s emerging is a very different kind of search experience – one that rewrites the rules for businesses who rely on being found online.
As we head towards 2026, I believe we’ll see some major shifts that will fundamentally alter how search works – and what it means for organic visibility and paid advertising.
I’ll break it down:
Most of Google’s business model rests on paid search (mainly Google Ads). If users bypass the traditional 10 blue links and Sponsored Ads, and jump straight to AI-powered answers, the clicks – and therefore the revenue – from Google Ads is at risk.
Google knows this and is why you’re starting to see ads being inserted into AI answers – sometimes subtly, sometimes not. This is only the beginning of a wider experiment that enables them to maximise revenues while trying to keep searchers happy.
Meanwhile, tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are also improving search experiences, but without the same dependency on advertising – yet. As they grow, they’ll need sustainable revenue models too, which inevitably leads to some form of paid placements.
The platforms that win will be those that balance user trust, experience, and commercial interests best.
It’s a brave (or stupid) person that makes predictions, but here are mine. It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out over the next couple of years …
Google will gradually phase out what we currently know as traditional search. Instead of seeing lists of links and being able to scroll, people will engage with conversational AI results by default – Google won’t call this “AI Mode”; it will just be search.
Here’s what that could look like:
For advertisers, this is unsettling. As of mid-2025, Google’s predictive targeting is still patchy at best. Giving up control will feel like handing your budget to a black box – but there may be no other choice if there are no other search results available within the page.
Businesses relying on ranking on page 1 or 2 of Google organically will see their traffic decimated because people no longer need to scroll.
The second, more radical shift could be seen as me catastrophising but I see it (or a variaton of it) as a possibility.
Free organic listings that involve buyer intent could vanish entirely from AI-powered search.
Not just the absence of scrolling and blue links to click on, but businesses not appearing in any Google results unless they pay for it.
In this scenario, visibility may become “opt-in” – only businesses willing to pay to be considered for inclusion in results will appear.
Imagine this applied to your own type of business:
In this world, SEO still matters – but only insofar as it trains the AI to understand what your business does. The payoff isn’t visibility unless you’re also paying to activate it.
Google becomes not just the middleman but the matchmaker, judge and toll collector.
This would be a seismic shift and while many would say “that goes totally against why Google was set up in the first place – to provide search results”, I’d respond with: “that was decades ago, when they didn’t have a paid model, huge overheads, and ever-hungry shareholders looking for more profits”.
Or are any of the other tech giants (including the AI players such as ChatGPT, Perplexity etc.)?
Not really.
Yes, they could still show search results for generic searches where it’s clear there’s little or no buyer intent (e.g. a search for how to maintain a small garden in drought situations) and so provide what could be viewed as being a ‘public service’ … but is there anything obliging them to do more than that for businesses?
For businesses, it could mean preparing for a future where:
The current position is that Google are the biggest player in search and they will hold onto that for as long as they are relevant to the searchers.
If the new AI Mode type Google produced rubbish results because Google favoured paid advertisers, then people would soon shift allegiance to other search systems that provided a closer match to what they wanted.
Google will know this and the potential outcome here is that Google may find itself advising businesses to do certain things with their websites if they even hope to get considered to be made visible (if they opt into paying for such clicks). I also feel that it’s likely that the cost of paid clicks will increase substantially because the niche searches people make will be so well-targeted that the websites people click through to are likely to have all the right content to encourage contact to be made (which is quite unlike the current position with weak websites).
But Google won’t have the market to themselves – they have the upper hand in dominance but quality will still win. Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity etc. will also need paid revenue angles within their own solutions because their current models are unsustainable, due to the resources they eat up.
The question yet to be answered is which platforms will provide the best results for humans searching, and also for the millions of businesses worldwide that want to be highly visible when people are looking for what they offer.
Google is not going to do anything to damage its Google Ads revenues.
The worst-case scenario is that more people will use non-Google systems to search and Google will respond by increasing the costs per click advertisers have to pay. But that’s only sustainable for a limited time before advertisers start to reject those higher advertising costs.
Even now, and even pre-AI, the costs per click in places like the USA are at ridiculous levels compared to places like the UK, and there’s no way that UK businesses would pay more for clicks within a Google Ads system that is so weak in its current form.
All this does raise some interesting questions because in theory, AI searching can surface good matches for what people looked for. Good enough to be worth paying more for a click from them (in the absence of free organic visibility).
I have personally dealt with Google Ads campaigns for 20 years, seen it go from a fair system to a thieving system that charges for clicks when people have typed phrases that are off-target compared to the intention. And then there’s all the hidden data, where you have no idea at all of what you were made visible for when people searched.
In short: Google, via Google Ads, are fleecing their advertisers in so many ways.
If someone came to me and asked if I’d rather pay £4 per click to Google and get 1 useful click out of 10 (£40 cost per acquisition) or pay £10 per click and get 1 useful click out of 2 (£20 cost per acquisition), I’m going with the latter.
And that’s what AI visibility can potentially achieve.
For businesses, here are considerations, both short and long-term …
Expect paid ad clicks cost to rise in line with people not searching on Google as much. Google have to show their shareholders that they are constantly increasing revenues – all they have to do is increase the cost of clicks.
Try to capitalise on the free organic position in AI results (on Google, ChatGPT etc.) but be ready for when that may disappear. Basically: pump lots of resources into making your business highly visible, make money for as long as possible, and squirrel some of it away for when the search systems evolve.
Be ready and prepared to advertise on all the AI search systems that offer paid advertising. They will each differ in the results they produce and so you’ll need to allocate budget to different platforms. Also, ensure that you are closely tracking enquiries/sales gained, and which AI platform they came from.
Be prepared for an end to traditional search engine visibility as you currently know it, and for being expected to pay for visibility in the future.
This could be viewed as a wild and “that’d never happen” prediction.
If we end up in a position where businesses are expected to ‘pay to play’ to get online visibility via Google and other platforms, then that could have potentially huge impacts on economies.
Taking the UK as an example, if such a scenario destroyed even 10% of the smaller businesses (through their inability to pay to play) then the knock-on effects are people out of work, leading to strains on the system and threats to voting patterns.
In that type of scenario it’s feasible that governments will step in with country-branded search systems of their own – likely as white labels of emerging AI players (for example, the Chinese DeepSeek).
Such solutions, well-publicised by governments, will effectively say to people something like:
If you want to search for solutions in a truly impartial way, while supporting UK businesses, then use this search system instead of Google, ChatGPT etc. because it focuses purely on UK businesses and is not pay to play.
Such messaging, when implemented well, takes paid advertising away from the dominant players because the ‘local’ businesses will want to get free visibility.
Of course, nothing is free forever – especially from governments – but there could be opportunities to turn such systems into revenue generators in a mutually beneficial way (e.g. companies pay a low membership fee and topups based on how many clicks they’ve had over a period of time). As long as the system is considered to be fair to all, it could work.
These are of course just my thoughts as at August 2025, and anything could happen.
I could be painting a pessimistic picture, but one thing I know for sure is that corporate greed will always dominate and the business and human casualties could be many if they’re not prepared.