You talk about those people who had a close to a search monopoly, and to make the line go up, degraded results so people would spend more time searching (and thus being exposed to ads)?

They’re betting that they can slowly start incorporating ads into those AI summaries.

EDIT: However that’s a losing bet as anyone can get a local model that can do a search like that without the enshittified model.

There's also been a multiyear trend of dropping ad sales overall, especially with higher quality companies. Meaning they need far more impressions of the same buyers to make ends meet.

They are all experiencing a recession, hidden by the Ai bubble, so the only people buying ads are lower quality scam companies, gambling and other bullshit. These are less sustainable clients that can vanish at any moment.

Ads targetting people who cant afford to buy things are also not super viable.