Search has changed. Have you?

 

So how did we get here, and what happens next?

ChatGPT was released in November 2022.

A lot has changed since then.

To understand the magnitude of this moment, it’s worth taking a quick stroll down memory lane.

Google was officially launched in 1998, founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s current CEO, was just eight years old.

Google rose to prominence in the early 2000s, and it quickly became clear that the writing was on the wall for businesses built around listings and directories.

But even when an entire industry is staring down a massive disruption, the decline takes time. It was more than a decade after Google’s launch before we could really see its impact on the Australian business landscape.

One of the clearest examples is the rise and fall of Sensis.

As a subsidiary of Australia’s largest telco, Telstra, Sensis owned both the Yellow Pages and White Pages. In 2004, it acquired the Trading Post to corner the market in print listings and directories.

In 2006, Yellow Pages alone brought in around $1.2 billion in revenue. It peaked in 2009 at $1.3 billion. But by 2012, it had dropped to just $861 million.

Across the group, total revenue at Sensis fell from $2.25 billion in 2009 to $1.47 billion in 2012. (Source: SBS.com.au)

That’s nearly $800 million in lost revenue in just three years.

 

What caused it?

Sensis didn’t lose revenue because people went from print to digital. They lost it because users went from scrolling through lists to typing in a query and getting a personalised result.

What changed was the overall user experience (UX) — it became faster, easier, cleaner, and far more relevant. Scrolling through business directories suddenly felt slow, clunky, and outdated. Google had raised the bar, and customer expectations moved with it.

And once users experience something better, their expectations don’t go backwards.

Since its launch, Google has completely reshaped how we discover information. It’s outlived or outplayed countless competitors and claimed the scalps of entire industries along the way. But despite all this, Google’s core experience hasn’t really changed — and it hasn’t had to.

Microsoft made a push with Bing, but could never capture more than around 5% market share. Other players barely scratched the surface. Google consistently held over 90% of the western world’s internet search traffic.

That kind of dominance is almost unheard of. You’d struggle to name another industry where one company has held so much control, in so many countries, for so long — even social media has seen more turnover at the top.

With that market power, Google hasn’t just dominated. It’s protected its core service — and possibly, it’s the lack of real competition that explains why its user experience hasn’t fundamentally changed.

Until AI.

 

So what’s different now?

For the first time since becoming a global powerhouse, Google’s business model is under real pressure.

The arrival of AI — and specifically, AI-powered responses to search — is changing what users expect, and that shift in expectation is what signals a true turning point.

You might ask: Why now? After two and a half decades of relative stability, what makes this moment different?

To answer that, let’s revisit the Yellow Pages.

What killed it wasn’t just new technology. It was a better experience. People didn’t switch because they cared about business models or back-end innovation — they switched because the result was faster, easier, and more useful.

Once someone tries a better experience, it’s hard to go back. The new UX sets a new standard.

That pattern was true for Google in the 2000s. It was also true for Uber, which launched in Australia in 2012. By 2022, the NSW Government was forced to announce a $950 million rescue package for taxi drivers whose plates had become worthless. Their only hope of competing was to retreat and protect its core offering (think Taxi ranks at airports) whilst they try and build their own apps to meet this new standard of customer expectation.

And it’s that 10-year mark where the impact becomes unavoidable. That’s when the bottom-line disruption becomes impossible to ignore.

 

So here’s the big call:

At that ten year mark, we’ll look back at this era, as the beginning of the AI-driven shift in search, just like we now look back on Uber or Google in their early days.

Because the user experience has changed. And expectations have risen. Again.

Now we know what’s possible — instant, intelligent, conversational search — we won’t settle for less. That expectation will ripple through every search result, every ad campaign, every customer journey.

And the implications for Australian businesses? Massive.

Many have become heavily dependent on Google, both organically and through paid campaigns. If performance drops by just a few per cent, it’ll show up in the numbers fast.

 

Google’s not going away overnight.

Like the taxi industry, Google’s business will retreat to protect its core — think: “plumber near me” searches, where its dominance is still strong, while it races to modernise its UX and deliver for this new set of customer expectations with tools like AI Overviews and AI Mode.

The impact of these changes — and how businesses can adapt — is what we’ll explore in this issue.

But one thing’s certain: The decade ahead, won’t look anything like the one behind us.

Search has already changed.

The next question is — have you?

 

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