Thats not a conspiracy theory, that is 100% whats going on, and there is documentation to prove it.

“Deteriorating” is the wrong word tho, that implies passivity, but their degradation was very much active and intentional.

If you’re curious as to why this would happen, I recommend reading the book “enshitification” by Cory Doctorow, it contains a much more nuanced and detailed explanation of what’s happened to search engines (and our whole society really).

The other reason that that book does not cover, is that the people who own these tech companies are fascists who want to control information/“truth”. So they made the best method of finding unbiased information more difficult, and simultaneously attempted to replace it with a chatbot that tells you whatever they programmed it to say “the truth” is.