When was the last time you Googled something? When was the last time you chose a search engine over AI?

Almost everyone I speak with goes straight to ChatGPT for answers. Sometimes it’s Claude, or Perplexity, Grok or Gemini.

But it’s rarely a traditional search.

The last time in recent memory that I used Google to search was when researching this post. I wanted to see what popped up when I asked a series of questions. And all I found was a list of pages with catchy titles and useless information.

Search Engine Optimization became an entire industry over the last decade. People trying to hack the algorithms in order to rank their websites higher than the other guy. If your site landed on the second page of search results, your website might as well not exist.

Bloggers and SEO killed traditional search engine use. Flashy headlines and clickbait titles like “Top 10 Best …” dominate the landscape. And that’s after the heaps of sponsored links — the websites that paid Google for priority access.

This pissed everyone off. How many times have you clicked one of these links only to scour the website for your answer, only to find nothing helpful, or the same copied content that everyone else posted?

In the last few years, searching for answers on the internet has been a painful, time-consuming endeavour.

Enter AI.

Ask a simple question, and it runs through its knowledge base — sometimes searching dozens of websites in seconds and analyzing the collective data — and spits out a clear and concise answer.

And while it isn’t always perfect, it’s almost instantaneous. Even with fact-checking and cross-referencing, it’s many times faster than the old way.

You get a better answer, more concise, better researched, and resulting from the culmination of analyzing every page you otherwise would have spent reading yourself.

AI didn’t kill traditional search — it became the tool we needed to replace a failed system.