The world still “Googles”—but more often it also prompts, circles or asks an AI search assistant. What does that mean for search, publishers, and the brands whose product stories appear on Icecat?
Google processed an estimated 13–14 billion queries per day in early 2025, and on mobile it still commands a 94 % global market share. Habit, default settings and sheer brand gravity keep the engine in front of billions of eyeballs. Even as its veneer of inevitability fades. Quickly!
When Apple’s Eddy Cue testified that Safari‑originated Google searches fell for the first time in April 2025, it sounded unthinkable. Google publicly disputed the precise numbers, yet the incident exposes real churn. Every percentage‑point slip on iOS can redirect millions of queries toward rival answer engines. Most notably AIs.
Google’s own AI Overviews now sit atop many result pages. Independent tracking shows they have pushed the “zero‑click” rate sharply higher, slicing news‑site traffic from 2.3 billion visits in mid‑2024 to <1.7 billion in May 2025. Publishers fear a replay of Facebook’s 2018 “pivot to video” shock—only this time the pivot is to Google’s own machine‑generated summaries.
On the Icecat.biz site, we can already see the effects. In the first six months of 2025, a 62% year-over-year drop in consumers browsing the data pool via Google, although the retail community traffic stayed in tact. For Icecat it hardly matters as we have no advertising business model, but it is very interesting to be able to monitor the dramatic change in consumer behavior in a time frame of just 12 months! For publisher sites that largely depend on ad income, the impact is far more palpable. Organic traffic through SEO is not fully going to be replaced by AEO (AI Engine Optimization) induced traffic.
Logically, that SEO teams complain that paid units push organic results below the fold on commercial queries, while 2025’s core updates continue to produce ranking whiplash. For users, the sense that “Google equals ads” drives experimentation with TikTok search, Amazon’s vertical results, or AI chat—especially among Gen Z.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT crossed 400 million weekly active users (WAU) by February 2025, but crucially Google query volume still grew more than 20 % in the same period. The hotter up‑and‑comer is Perplexity, which jumped from 230 million monthly queries in mid‑2024 to 780 million in May 2025 (≈30 million a day) and is openly chasing “a billion queries a week” by year‑end. These AI services don’t just list links – they compose, compare, cite, and even book flights, nibbling at use‑cases that once defaulted to Google.
Instead of one doorway to the web, users increasingly assemble a new stack, competing with the old Google reflexes:
Brands and retailers must ensure their content is readable by multiple parsers – structured data for Google, citations for LLMs, short‑form video for social, and high‑depth specs for “agentic” shopping bots.
Google Search is not dead—but it is plural. So, it’s search monopoly explodes like a fragmentation granate. For the first time in 20 years, brands must optimize for a world where the customer journey hops between engines, feeds and AIs. The companies that speak every search dialect – link, snippet, citation, short‑video and agent API – will own tomorrow’s digital shelf. At Icecat we’re doubling down on semantic, machine‑readable product content so our partners stay findable, clickable and buyable – whatever tool the shopper uses next.
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Founder and CEO of Icecat NV. Investor. Ph.D.
