I'm so confused by Googles AI search assistant. I have yet to figure out how this would make any economic sense for Google. What this AI-box does is to worsen the quality of answers given and lessen the clicks on any links in the search results - including ads!
Of course I also regularly use AI. My main research tool shifted from Google/DuckDuckGo to PerplexityAI and ChatGPT. It is fairly rare that I am still using a real search engine. I only do so, when my intention is to actually find a link I want to click on and not just get a summarized reply to my question.
But this leads to websites receiving less traffic and also makes me more volatile to believing hallucinated answers.
Also, there is the topic of energy consumption. I think we don't have to talk about climate change: It's a disaster we need to stop - and popular AI in its current form and use isn't particularly helping. But the thing that makes me a lot more curious: When will AI be monitized? As I said before, AI just leads to decreased clicks on links, including ads AND it consumes more energy, meaning higher costs for the companies. This doesn't sound ideal to build an economic model around...
What I think we will see in the upcoming years is that - as with other platforms like YouTube, Amazon etc. - certain companies will build a near absolute monopoly with their technology and then plaster it with ads to near un-usability.
From what I have seen a lot of the AI tools already have a paywall or something like that. Google has a pretty hefty fee schedule if you want to use Gemini with Workspace. I understand what you are saying though. Eventually they are going to need to recoup that money somehow.