Creative Ways Google Might Make Money in the AI-Search Future

In the last 6 months, I’ve noticed a huge shift in how I use the web. I don’t really Google anymore; search-enabled LLMs have replaced most of my web browsing. And while there are legitimate reasons to think the AI craze will blow over, as marketers we need to seriously plan for where this all might be going: a world where most audiences rarely see search results, rarely see Google ads, rarely see banner ads, and rarely see SEO content. Let’s chew on that for a moment. Because the implications for digital advertising are far-reaching: if your business involves people clicking on things, and no one is clicking on things, you’re going to have a lot of red in your reports potentially in the closer-than-not future.

It got me thinking, let’s assume that the AI search trendline continues, how are companies like Google, Bing, and others going to adapt? The traditional search business model is on track to stay strong in 2025 but how will these companies make their money in 2026 and beyond? It’s a fun speculative question that’s worth contemplating for agencies, since what we do is a secondary service totally dependent on how all this shakes out.

Three Possible Ways Search Engines will Make Money in an AI-future:

Pay-per-Review

Google Reviews are worth more than gold — we don’t think about them as a asset attached to a dollar figure but in a hypothetical world dominated by AI-search, the most precious commodity will be directly relevant human testament.

So at some point there will be the temptation to monetize reviews. And it could be done in a couple of different ways. Here’s an easy method to imagine: any user could post a review like they do today, but companies would have to pay to display reviews after a certain amount of free ones. So like, your first 20 reviews would be free but you’d have to pay a premium to show others. Or another monetized feature could be paying to verify reviews are real and only displaying genuine ones with a little check (sort of an extension of the verified profile concept on X). Hell who knows, maybe in 2026 you’ll be able to pay Google to edit/remove reviews you don’t like.

However it’s implemented, reviews are only going to become increasingly valuable. AI can endlessly spit out generative content — but there’s no simulating reviews.

Restrictive Indexing

If you use Google, you’ve probably noticed an increase in the frequency of Reddit content appearing in search results over the last year. That’s no accident: Reddit and Google have a business relationship, and as a condition of that arrangement Reddit results were given an algorithmic priority. As a user I hate that: it’s not quite an ad, but it’s similar and more insidious; my view into the world has been modified for money. But then again, what we see online is already much more partitioned than we like to think.

Okay, so let’s take what’s happening now and dial it up. Imagine if Reddit posts only appeared on Google results. Or a step further, if Reddit could only be accessed through Google.

In the future, popular websites might sign exclusivity deals with search engines. Their content would become invisible to non-paying crawlers and AI trainers. And if this became normalized it could even trickle down to smaller internet users. If you’re a local business and you agree to only index your site on so-and-so search engine, maybe that search engine rewards you with good rankings or a monthly payout based on the size of the site and the quality of traffic.

The internet is already fenced off geopolitically. If the money was there, companies will do the same to everyday search results.

Algorithms that Reward Experience

Young marketers probably roll their eyes when they hear elder millennials reminisce about the Web 1.0 days. But if you’re one of the old timers, you remember that using the Internet was once so fun we called it surfing. Websites were quirky and invited exploration; users would click through every page, and bookmark sites they enjoyed to revisit or check for updates. And believe it or not, those users even interacted with banner ads.

Conventional thinking will argue that today’s attention-short audiences want information served up fast, especially when browsing on small screens. But I disagree. Sure, the average web session in 2025 is around 45 seconds. But that’s an average, and averages are misleading. A typical social media session is around 10 minutes, and that’s generally on a smartphone. People crave stimulation. But it goes way beyond that. We want someone to awaken our sense of curiosity. We want to explore.

So ironically, the most viable future of web browsing might be a totally retooled algorithm philosophy designed in the spirit of the Web 1.0 experience modernized to today’s technology. Let AI’s fulfil information requests. Search engines should promote interesting and engaging web experiences. You’ll get longer sessions, frequent returning users, and a whole lot more interactions.

The Future For Marketers

I’m bearish on AI. Will it change everything? Maybe. Maybe not. But we in the marketing industry have to watch this closely and prep for a business environment radically unfamiliar to today’s. Even in early 2025, you can feel the ground shifting under our feet and I sense marketing services, and the entire supporting agency model, will inevitably change quite a lot in the coming years regardless.