No AI, just the dinobaby expressing his opinions to Zellenials.
With search traffic zipping right along, one would think that Google would be able to use its own advertising system to get its AI message out, wouldn’t you? Answer: Nope.
Google is advertising its smart software on Techmeme, a semi-useful headline aggregator. Here’s the advertisement I spotted on May 9, 2025:
The link in the advertisement points to this:
The sponsored post wants the user to log in. Whatever happened to that single sign on, Google. Also, the headline is “Meet Gemini, Your Personal AI Assistant.” I thought that Google had “won” the AI marketing wars. If that assertion were true, why is Google advertising its service on a news headline outfit?
Perhaps the advertisement is a tacit admission that Eddie Cue’s “traffic is down” comment and the somewhat surprising revelations by Cloudflare’s Big Dog in “Bernard L. Schwartz Annual Lecture With Matthew Prince of Cloudflare” contain tiny nuggets of useful information; namely, traditional Google search is losing traction. In parallel, the uptake of Google’s Gemini Flash 2.0 (quite a moniker) is losing the consumer sector to OpenAI and Sam AI-Man. If true, the Google may face some headwinds in the last half of 2025. There are the legal hassles and the EU’s ka-ching method for extracting cash from the Google. Now an ominous cloud is in the sky: Google has to advertise its Gemini 2.0 Flash on a news aggregation site, presumably to get traffic.
Plus, the Google wants to know if the ad on Techmeme is working. I thought Google’s advertising analytics system had hard data about the magnetism of specific sites. That’s part of the mysterious “quality” score I described more than a decade ago in my The Google Legacy.
Taking my simplistic, uninformed, dinobaby view of Google’s advertising effort, I would suggest:
The signals about declining search traffic warrant attention. SEO wizards, Google’s ad partners, and its own ad wizards depend on what once was limitless search traffic. If that erodes, those infrastructure costs will become a bit of a challenge. Profits and jobs depend on mindless queries.
Google’s reaction to these signals indicates that the company’s “leadership” knows that there is trouble in paradise. The terse statement that the Cue comment about a decline in Apple to Google search traffic and this itty bitty ad are not accidents of fate. The Google once controlled fate. Now the fabled company is in a sticky spot like Sisyphus.
The irony of Google’s problem stems from its own Transformer innovation. Released to open source, Google may be learning that its uphill battle is of its own creation. Nice work, “leadership.”
Net net: In 2025, we have the makings of a Greek tragedy. Will a 21st century Aeschylus capture the rise and fall of god-like entities? Probably not, but we will have tiny tombstone ads and Cue quips.
Stephen E Arnold, May 16, 2025
Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining
and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky.
He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues
worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go
"beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site
with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.
