21d • General discussion
Search Isn’t Dying — It’s Getting Absorbed. And Nobody’s Ready.
For the first time in 25 years, consumers aren’t choosing a search engine…
they’re choosing an assistant.
Atlas. Comet. Perplexity. Gemini. Copilot.
Even Apple’s about to enter the chat.
And here’s the quiet shift almost no one is talking about:
We’re moving from Browser → Search → Results
to Surface → AI → Answer.
Traditional search isn’t disappearing —
it’s just moving upstream where users never see it.
Google knows this.
That’s why the homepage is slowly steering toward AI-first by default.
The “two-lane highway” (classic search vs AI mode) won’t last.
In a year or two, we won’t ask:
“Which search engine do you use?”
We’ll ask:
“Which AI do you trust to interpret the internet for you?”
That’s the battleground now.
And the real optimization shift isn’t ranking → referencing.
It’s ranking → being ingested.
The brands that understand that won’t just survive this transition —
they’ll shape it.
What do you think — are we ready for an AI-first internet, or are we clinging to the last stage of the old era?
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Search Isn’t Dying — It’s Getting Absorbed. And Nobody’s Ready.
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