How is that any different than someone installing an ad blocker in their browser? Arguably ad blocker is much simpler technology than running a local LLM and has been available for years now. And yet Google’s ad revenue seems to have remained unaffected.
It's been demonstrated that as ChatGPT usage goes up, traffic to sites dependent on SEO search ranking has gone down, roughly proportionally, every month over the last ~18 months. ChatGPT is free and fast and requires no technical know-how. Installing an ad blocker requires knowing what one is, and the time and energy to install a browser plugin. Pretty much everyone I know thinks free online ChatGPT type products is an absolute existential thread to Google's ad dominance. Even mediocre LLMs provide a vastly better experience than ad choked pages linking to ad choked SEO optimized websites serving (largely) google's own ads.
There are millions of websites, and a local LLM cannot scrape all of them to make sense of them. Think about it. OpenAI can do it because they spend millions to train its systems.
Many sites have hidden sitemaps that cannot be found unless submitted to google directly. (Not even listed in robots txt most of the time). There is no way a local LLM can keep up with up to date internet.
I think because Google knows traditional search is gonna die, they will be aggressively pushing ads on traditional search to extract as much money as possible till they figure out newer ways of making money.
