Google used to be a search engine. Now it wants to be everything

Twenty years ago, if you asked the average person what Google was, they’d tell you it was a search engine. The company became synonymous with searching for information online, reaching a level of dominance no search engine had seen before, or has seen since.

Ask the average person today and they’d probably tell you the same thing. Except Google isn’t just that anymore. It’s a far more complicated company, one trying to be all things to all people, and arguably succeeding at none of them.

Google is now a five-layer company, says David Bader, director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. One of the key layers is AI, which could account for $185 billion in capital expenditure this year, “larger than the GDP of most countries,” according to Bader. That level of spending signals how dramatically the company has changed direction. “No serious search-only company spends like this,” he says.

That focus on AI is increasingly visible to end users, with AI layered into more and more Google products. “They’re shoving Gemini into every nook and cranny, whether it’s GSuite, whether it’s email, whether it’s Maps, whatever,” says Alex Hanna, a former Google employee and director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute.

Still, there remains a gap between what Google is, depending on who you ask and where they sit. “There’s how Google sees itself internally, which I think is they see themselves a bit more as an AI company,” says Hanna. That contrasts with how much of the world still sees the company: primarily as a search engine. And, in Hanna’s view, that experience has deteriorated. “When you use Google Search, it’s trash. It sucks,” she says.

Hanna argues that the decline in search quality is partly tied to the way Google is reshaping its business model for the post-ChatGPT era, one in which AI can bypass traditional search entirely and reduce the need for users to visit either a search engine or the websites it indexes.

Advertising remains Google’s “cash cow,” says Bader, accounting for 74% of its revenue. But others believe that dominance could erode as AI reshapes search behavior. “They know that what they have to move to is a model that isn’t based on ad revenue,” says Hanna. “It’s based on whether they can find a pathway to monetize the AI infrastructure that they’ve been building out.”

Still, “Google Search isn’t going away,” says Gartner analyst Ed Anderson. “And I think Google Search will continue to be one of the primary touchpoints for years to come.”

Beyond monetizing its AI infrastructure, Google is also reshaping other parts of its business to maintain its cash flow. That includes generating billions through cloud infrastructure, which Bader says has grown 63% year over year and has become “a real number three to AWS and Azure,” accounting for roughly a fifth of the company’s overall business.

Google is also increasingly deploying its capital as an investor. The company owns about 6% of SpaceX and roughly 14% of Anthropic, alongside stakes in or ownership of companies including Waymo and Wiz, the latter of which it acquired for $32 billion, plus dozens of other holdings. The result, some critics argue, is that Google increasingly resembles “a glorified venture capital fund.”

Whether having so many fingers in so many pies means Google has lost its way, or simply found a new one, remains an open question. “We live in an economy where you have to show growth,” says Hanna. “They’re in this very weird position where they are in third place or fourth place again, even though they were a first mover on the tech.” That, in turn, makes the company feel even more muddled.

Not everyone is so pessimistic. “The interesting part is not that any single label [of what Google is] is wrong,” says Bader. “The interesting part is that all five are simultaneously true, and that’s never been true of any single company before.”

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