Google Is Entering Its Janus Era
September 30, 2025
This essay is the work of a dumb dinobaby. No smart software required.
The Romans found the “god” Janus a way to demarcate the old from the new. (Yep, January is a variant of this religious belief: A threshold between old and new.
Venice.ai imagines Janus as a statue.
Google is at its Janus moment. Let me explain.
The past at Google was characterized by processing a two or three word “query” and providing the user with a list of allegedly relevant links. Over time, the relevance degraded and the “pay to play” ads began to become more important. Ed Zitron identified Prabhakar Raghavan as the Google genius associated with this money-making shift. (Good work, Prabhakar! Forget those Verity days.)
The future is signaled with two parallel Google tactics. Let me share my thoughts with you.
The first push at Google is its PR / marketing effort to position itself as the Big Dog in technology. Examples range from Google’s AI grand wizard passing judgment on the inferiority of a competitor. A good example of this approach is the Futurism write up titled “CEO of DeepMind Points Out the Obvious: OpenAI Is Lying about Having PhD Level AI.” The outline of Google’s approach is to use a grand wizard in London to state the obvious to those too stupid to understand that AI marketing is snake oil, a bit of baloney, and a couple of measuring cups of jargon. Thanks for the insight, Google.
The second push is that Google is working quietly to cut what costs it can. The outfit has oodles of market cap, but the cash burn for [a] data centers, [b] hardware and infrastructure, [c] software fixes when kids are told to eat rocks and glue cheese on pizza (remember the hallucination issues?), and [d] emergency red, yellow, orange, or whatever colors suits the crisis convert directly into additional costs. (Can you hear Sundar saying, “I don’t want to hear about costs. I want Gmail back online. Why are you still in my office?)
As a result of these two tactical moves, Google’s leadership is working overtime to project the cool, calm demeanor of a McKinsey-type consultant who just learned that his largest engagement client has decided to shift to another blue-chip firm. I would consider praying to Janus if that we me in my consulting role. I would also think about getting reassigned to project involving frequent travel to Myanmar and how to explain that to my wife.
Venice.ai puts a senior manager at a big search company in front of a group of well-paid but very nervous wizards.
What’s an example of sending a cost signal to the legions of 9-9-6 Googlers? Navigate to “Google Isn’t Kidding Around about Cost Cutting, Even Slashing Its FT subscription.” [Oh, FT means the weird orange newspaper, the Financial Times.] The write up reports as actual factual that Google is dumping people by “eliminating 35 percent of managers who oversee teams of three people or fewer.” Does that make a Googler feel good about becoming a Xoogler because he or she is in the same class as a cancelled newspaper subscription. Now that’s a piercing signal about the value of a Googler after the baloney some employees chew through to get hired in the first place.
The context for these two thrusts is that the good old days are becoming a memory. Why? That’s easy to answer. Just navigate to “Report: The Impact of AI Overviews in the Cultural Sector.” Skip the soft Twinkie filling and go for the numbers. Here’s a sampling of why Google is amping up its marketing and increasing its effort to cut what costs it can. (No one at Google wants to admit that the next big thing may be nothing more than a repeat of the crash of the enterprise search sector which put one executive in jail and others finding their future elsewhere like becoming a guide or posting on LinkedIn for a “living.”)
Here are some data and I quote from “Report: The Impact…”:
- Organic traffic is down 10% in early 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. On the surface, that may not sound bad, but search traffic rose 30% in 2024. That’s a 40-point swing in the wrong direction.
- 80% of organizations have seen decreases in search traffic. Of those that have increased their traffic from Google, most have done so at a much slower rate than last year.
- Informational content has been hit hardest. Visitor information, beginner-level articles, glossaries, and even online collections are seeing fewer clicks. Transactional content has held up better, so organizations that mostly care about their event and exhibition pages might not be feeling the effect yet.
- Visibility varies. On average, organizations appear in only 6% of relevant AI Overviews. Top performers are achieving 13% and they tend to have stronger SEO foundations in place.
My view of this is typical dinobaby. You Millennials, GenX, Y, Z, and Gen AI people will have a different view. (Let many flowers bloom.):
- Google is for the first time in its colorful history faced with problems in its advertising machine. Yeah, it worked so well for so long, but obviously something is creating change at the Google
- The mindless AI hyperbole has not given way to direct criticism of a competitor who has a history of being somewhat unpredictable. Nothing rattles the cage of big time consultants more than uncertainty. OpenAI is uncertainty on steroids.
- The impact of Google’s management methods is likely to be a catalyst for some volatile compounds at the Google. Employees and possibly contractors may become less docile. Money can buy their happiness I suppose, but the one thing Google wants to hang on to at this time is money to feed the AI furnace.
Net net: Google is going to be an interesting outfit to monitor in the next six months. Will the European Union continue to send Google big bills for violating its rules? Will the US government take action against the outfit one Federal judge said was a monopoly? Will Google’s executive leadership find itself driven into a corner if revenues and growth stall and then decline? Janus, what do you think?
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2025
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