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Musk asserts AI will make search redundant in comment on Google Search share dipping below 90%

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But as firms seek to monetize their AI investments, we expect AI results to lose their cleanness.

Elon Musk
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Google Search’s market share fell below 90% in late 2024, happening for the first time in almost a decade. According to StatCounter, the search giant’s share first dropped in the last quarter of 2024, when it hit 89.34%. The company was able to briefly recover to 90.15% in February 2025, then fell back down to 89.71% the following month and has yet to recover.

International Blockchain Consulting Group founder Mario Nawfal first shared this info on his X (formerly Twitter) account, saying, “Why dig through link farms when you can just Grok it and get straight to the point?” Elon Musk then reposted this, adding the caption, “AI will obviate search @grok”.

AI search can indeed be more convenient than sifting through website-based search results. And even though Google sometimes tries to get the best results on the front page of search engine results pages, many “SEO specialists” game the system just to get their websites on top. There’s also the issue of sponsored results, which can confuse people who just want the best answer to their queries.

However, AI search isn’t perfect — we’ve already seen several cringeworthy Google AI answers, and AI is also known to hallucinate and give out wrong answers. So, if you’re going to rely on that, you cannot take its answers at face value. Instead, you must always ask it for sources so you can ascertain for yourself if the answer it returned is true or false. This might be an issue, though, if a user does not do this verification step and takes AI answers as gospel.

More importantly, nothing in this world is free. AI companies are investing billions into research and development, so they have to some way, somehow, make money from it. So, unless everyone pays for an AI subscription, AI search might eventually be filled with ads, too, to offset operational costs.

And who’s to say that AI systems cannot be gamified? We’ve already seen 'experts' online telling people how to make content 'AI-friendly.' While we cannot blame people for offering services to website owners who want their pages to have a wider reach, would AI tech be smart enough to determine when a certain page is the best answer that a specific person is looking for?

The development of AI has been controversial, especially with the countless number of allegations and lawsuits based on the unlawful use of intellectual property. If AI search takes off and starts to replace traditional search, this will definitely be another can of worms that must be addressed, or else we risk killing the creativity that AI LLMs rely on for their training data and end up with useless results from AI searches based on AI-generated gloop.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

33 Comments Comment from the forums
  • King_V
    Or, maybe, just maybe, people might be starting to shift away from Google BECAUSE they're pushing the AI generated answers.
    Reply
  • SomeoneElse23
    My prediction has always been that "AI" will fizzle out (when the next hype comes along) and will turn into Search 2.0.

    "AI" that we have today is next evolution of search engines.

    But it's certainly not intelligent.
    Reply
  • usertests
    King_V said:
    Or, maybe, just maybe, people might be starting to shift away from Google BECAUSE they're pushing the AI generated answers.
    Basically all of them are doing it now. I use Brave search's AI to generate simple code examples or look up functions.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    Google has never been the best, fastest search engine. It is just popular because it is the default one for the most popular web browsers.
    It used to come as addon malware to "free" software downloads. It's use is a great example of artificially induced product popularity.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    "AI", in this context, is just essentially "An Index" that's more interactive than a simple search and can "understand" conversational text so you can refine the results, but at its heart it's still a metasearch engine that's only as useful as the inputs, and are as prone to false information as an elementary school child's book report if it's not drawing from reputable sources.

    Now where Musk is right is that AI will replace general searches when it comes to custom AI trained on very specific and known good information, such as law libraries and medical libraries, but those aren't what he's talking about here.
    Reply
  • butidontwantausername
    This makes no sense at all, but that's par for the course for Musk and his inability to predict anything further away than his next poo.

    If I have an expensive heritage turkey I want to brine and I need to look up the ratio of salt to water, do I just trust whatever the AI spits out, or do I have to take the extra step of asking it for a source, then checking that source to make sure it didn't tell me to use 2 pounds of salt per cup of water? If I have to verify the artificial idiot isn't hallucinating that doesn't save any time or effort over using a standard search engine and hitting a reputable site to get the correct answer. About the only way you could get around that is to ask the idiot for a site that tells you how to brine, but even that isn't any quicker or easier than just using a search engine, and you still need to verify the results manually.
    Reply
  • BFG-9000
    There's a reason "why can't I find anything on Google anymore" or "what happened to Google search" are popular searches.

    It's because current Google CEO Sundar Pichai turned away from their traditional PageRank search algorithm to AI, so now all search results heavily prioritize low-quality or even useless AI-generated content and SEO-optimized pages over actual useful hits.

    Instead of how many views or links there are to a page, AI attempts to find the most confidently authoritative sounding ones.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    AI will make search redundant

    given how much search has gone to sewers after ai added to it...idk about that.

    "ai" can be used for some stuff but search apparently isnt one of em.
    Its sloppy results and I am better off just using search to look from reddit :|
    Reply
  • ttquantia
    I am happy to have "AI" (nowadays mostly meaning LLM, which is not really the same as AI) search as soon as the very very serious problem of hallucinations has been solved. Which most likely won't be in the next 10 years.
    Elon Musk says many interesting things, like fully autonomous self-driving will be available in 2017. Or 2018. Or 2019. And so on. Claims which all have turned out to be false. I don't think Elon Musk knows and understands much of the things he says. He is a poorly informed person.
    Reply
  • mwestall
    Muskrat also asserted he'd have full self driving 6 years ago.
    The man's a class 1 idiot.
    Reply