Growing Ecommerce · 2026-06-23 · 28 min
Google just announced the biggest change to search in its history - and not everyone is happy. At Google I/O, the search bar became a search box, signaling a full shift toward conversational, Gemini-powered search. The market is already reacting: DuckDuckGo rocketed from around position 400 to the top 100 in the app stores almost overnight, right around the May 20 - 21 launch. Mike Ryan and Chris unpack what a privacy-and-no-AI search wrapper suddenly surging tells us about consumer appetite - and why the relentless pace of change is exhausting retailers and experts alike. Then: fresh eMarketer data puts the AI advertising hype into much-needed context. AI ad spend in the US sits around $32B in 2026 (roughly a third of Google’s search spend), but ~80% of it is just AI-search-adjacent - ads above and below AI Overviews. The chatbot-driven slice everyone is panicking about? Tiny. We dig into why OpenAI’s $100B ad ambition looks unrealistic, what the 2030 projections actually say, and why the real takeaway for CMOs and CDOs is: prepare, but don’t abandon your bread and butter. The throughline: everything is changing, and everything is staying the same.
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