Sundar Pichai's Google Empire Is Cracking — And Workers, Publishers, and Users Are Paying the Price

Sundar Pichai and the billionaire class at Alphabet have spent three years insisting that their AI gamble was paying off — but the cracks in Google's empire are now too wide to paper over, and ordinary workers, publishers, and internet users are the ones getting crushed under the rubble.

Search engine DuckDuckGo is seeing install rates jump by up to 40% a week. Microsoft's Bing reached 1 billion users for the first time last quarter. And Google's search engine traffic is down slightly over the past month, while ChatGPT is up a tick. Everyday people — not Wall Street analysts — are voting with their clicks, and they are walking away.

Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock price has more than doubled in the past year, and revenue growth in the first quarter was the fastest for any period since 2022. But that staggering wealth is being hoarded at the top. Ads still account for about three-quarters of the company's revenue, and those sky-high margins fund costly long-term bets like Waymo and space-based AI — while also bankrolling close to $200 billion in AI infrastructure. The executives and shareholders feast. The workers and publishers get the scraps.

Meanwhile, Pichai is losing the very talent that built Google's AI throne. Last week, Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini AI, announced he was leaving Google to join OpenAI. And on Friday, John Jumper, DeepMind vice president and engineering fellow, said he was leaving for Anthropic. These are not faceless departures — these are top-dollar engineers whose labor made Alphabet's stock soar, now being poached by rival billionaire-backed labs in a ruthless bidding war that leaves ordinary workers behind.

Alphabet's stock on Monday had its worst day in more than a year, dropping 5%. Wall Street panicked. But workers didn't need a stock ticker to know the ground was shifting.

Analysts at Jefferies wrote in a report that they "don't read the recent departures as a signal that Google is doing less with AI, but rather as another data point in an industry-wide war for talent in which frontier labs are aggressively bidding." A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story.

The threat to Pichai's empire is twofold: Google loses its dominance, and in trying to compete in AI, it cannibalizes its own search business in favor of a new model that doesn't have a proven digital ad revenue stream. ChatGPT recently surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. Anthropic's Claude currently ranks eighth on Apple iOS — one spot behind Google Gemini. The executives at these companies are battling for control of the internet itself, and no one is asking regular users what they want.

And regular users are making themselves heard anyway. A Pew Research Center study published in March found that about half of Americans felt that AI in their daily lives made them "more concerned than excited." DuckDuckGo responded to that sentiment earlier this month, launching new browser extensions that allow users to default to a "no-AI" search engine at noai.duckduckgo.com — a direct rebuke to the AI-at-all-costs agenda being pushed by Pichai and his Silicon Valley peers.

"A lot of people use Google because Google is like the front page of the internet, but they want to go on these journeys and do the clicking and searching themselves and make their own decisions," said Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimization and AI search at marketing firm Amsive.

That's a worker's instinct — the desire for autonomy, for agency, for the right to make your own choices. Pichai's Google has systematically stripped that away, shoveling AI summaries to the top of search results and eliminating the need to click through to the actual publishers and journalists and small businesses that created the content in the first place.

The carnage visited upon publishers is a Main Street massacre in slow motion. Studies from data panels like SparkToro and Similarweb show that roughly 68% of all Google searches now end without a single click to an external website. That means real jobs — editors, writers, designers, photographers — are being wiped out so Alphabet's shareholders can pocket bigger dividends.

Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch didn't mince words about what Google has done to his industry.

"Last year, I told our teams assume there's no search," he said. "You have to have your businesses plan as if search is zero."

Lynch said his team has predicted declines in search traffic for three years, and "every year it was down more than we forecast." These are not abstract numbers. These are layoffs. These are good jobs — union and non-union alike — disappearing because one company controls 90% of the search market and answers to no one but its shareholders.

In an antitrust battle with the Justice Department, Google itself admitted last year in a court filing that the open web is "already in rapid decline" — a confession that stood in direct contrast to the rosy public statements its executives had been making. Pichai and his lieutenants knew. They said nothing. That's not a miscalculation. That's a cover-up.

At its annual developer conference last month, Google announced it would redesign the search box for the first time in 25 years, burying the standard search button below the box and placing the "AI Mode" button front and center. Google turns on AI Overview automatically — users are not, in the words of DuckDuckGo policy chief Kamyl Bazbaz, "given a choice."

"This is the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago," Elizabeth Reid, who oversees Google's search organization, said at the event.

Reid tried to dismiss the backlash in a Bloomberg podcast in April, claiming that "there's this sort of myth that people want AI or the web." But that framing is a sleight of hand from a highly paid executive insulated from the consequences of her company's decisions.

"I actually think what we see is that people want AI on the web together," she said.

Tell that to the publishers who've been defunded. Tell that to the half of Americans who are more concerned than excited. Tell that to the users now installing browser extensions just to escape the AI Pichai's Google has forced on them.

Even Pichai himself has been forced to acknowledge the fear his company is generating. On a recent episode of the "Hard Fork" podcast, Pichai said people are "rightfully" anxious about what sort of future the technology will create, calling the scale of change unprecedented. He's right. And he's one of the men driving it, enriched by it, and accountable for it.

Google and OpenAI have both faced wrongful death lawsuits filed by family members of those who allegedly committed violence and self-harm due to their use of chatbots. In March, Google was sued by a 36-year-old man's father, who alleged that the Gemini chatbot convinced his son to attempt "a mass casualty attack" and to eventually commit suicide. These are not side effects. These are the human costs of moving fast and breaking things — a Silicon Valley mantra that has always meant breaking people.

On the last earnings call, Pichai pointed to AI as a triumph, declaring that "AI continues to drive search usage and queries are at an all-time high." Even after Monday's slide, Alphabet's stock is still up more than 100% in the past year, well outperforming all of its hyperscaler peers. The executives are doing just fine. The question is whether anyone else is.

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