That's a fair point. If we saw a downward trend in google search usage in the last year or two, it might support your theory.
Whether AI and search are similar enough to call them competitors, at least right now, is highly debatable. I don't know about other people, but I for one have definitely not started asking chatbots questions instead of looking for informed, human-authored content.
EDIT: Note that I mean downward trend in total, not the percentages shown by statcounter. Statcounter does have a separate chatbot page though, if you're interested in that. Still doesn't answer your totally valid question of how many people are chatting instead of searching, though. Maybe Google or ChatGPT could tell us :)
1. In terms of US monopoly status, the USA chart would be more relevant than worldwide (also tangential but is Baidu really that weak in China or is there just no data?)
2. Google certainly has a stranglehold on mobile search (unsurprising given that both Apple and Android use Google search). In USA desktops Bing still isn't that strong, but it is 10% and not very low single digits. It makes sense to me that search volume has moved to mobile. It's super convenient to search quick things on phones wherever you happen to be vs finding a computer. But if for example a remedy was to essentially ban Google from Apple's mobile devices then it would really move the chart quickly given Apple's dominance in US mobile marketshare.
3. The biggest issue is those are percentages and not volumes. If search becomes irrelevant because people switch to other modalities it's not going to appear as a decline in these charts.
I would also add that search has already moved elsewhere.
Less and less people are using search engines to shop, ex:Amazon makes >$57B a year from search ads, but also look at Temu and Shein which are mostly glorified product search platforms.
No one is searching for "funny videos" when you can just open Instagram and Tiktok.
The only real unique thing that search engines can do is queries that are not directly commercial (e.g. education, information seeking, etc.) and competition is insanely intense (w/ ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc) there.
Honestly, I haven't used either of ChatGPT or Perplexity seriously. They haven't performed particularly well when I tested them and dun-dun-dun in my uses Gemini has been growing on me. And another odd thing at the moment is that Google's search has somehow become better at giving me the results I'm looking for and DDG is giving a lot of annoying crap.
Basically when I search for API of a specific function or package docs on DDG I end up with page after page of people blogging about using them and the actual docs don't show up. So I add "!g" and the same crap is there, but the link to reference will be somewhere among the first page of results (although Goggle usually has a link to an old stale version of the docs).
Do you have specific examples of this behavior that I can look into? Also, curious if you've tried our Assist function (comes up automatically for some searches or click Assist under search box) or duck.ai for stuff like that?
This argument was stronger a couple of years ago. But search is being commoditized at such a rapid pace that it's not clear that this is true anymore.
When analyst measure companies moats, they measure their strength in years/decades. How many years would you give Google Search at this point?