David vs. Goliath: why Google isn't going anywhere

Lots of companies are cashing in on this AI wave, and we'll see which platforms are left standing when the dust settles. You'd be led to believe OpenAI and Anthropic are accelerating faster than Google (true) and are destined to dominate (are they, or is there a glass ceiling?). Acceleration tells one story. But rather than get misdirected by hype, let's look at what Google has that the others don't:

1. 1.20+ years of search data
2. 2.Gmail
3. 3.Universal Cart and shopping
4. 4.Business profiles
5. 5.YouTube

SEARCH

First, those 20+ years of search data.

I remember when Google Webmaster Tools gave marketers insight into how people were searching.

Fast forward 20 years, and it hasn't changed all that much. We recently got AI Search impressions added - cool- but attribution to what actually drives revenue still feels like a Rube Goldberg machine at times.

Google likely has more personal data than any company on earth, down to a profile of who people are and what they're interested in.

They literally know if someone Googles "how to hide a body." Despite the acceleration of other channels over the last two years, none of this can be built without users filtering through your platform first.

Claude and Anthropic have an identity crisis, positioning themselves as tools for businesses while also being conversational search engines for consumers.

It took Google decades to build its ecosystem, and the acceleration of these new platforms is rapid, but time will tell how they manage explosive growth and turn it into real momentum.

GMAIL

Now, your inbox.

The thing you hold sacred and meticulously curate, the one that's representative of your interests, your shopping, your life. 22% of the global population uses it, about 1.8B monthly users.

Google knows what kind of coffee I like because of my Trade subscription. It knows what music I like from the tickets I buy. It knows I'm purchasing video equipment. It knows which newsletters I'm subscribed to, and it reminds me of the meetings I have with my family.

This becomes massive with Personal Intelligence, which Google announced earlier this year and again at I/O. It uses your Google apps to provide suggestions and context in results. ChatGPT has integrations in its 5.5 release to leverage your inbox, but it's not native the way it is with Google. This is a huge growth lever, and it's what will make Google feel more personal.

Garrett Sussman from iPullRank ran a whole study on Personal Intelligence faster and better than I ever could. Props to this gentleman.

The TL;DR: brand appearance rose from 23.9% to 66.8% in the Personal Intelligence account, and brands introduced through email appeared in 53.6% of responses, making inbox content a major AI Search variable.

COMMERCE

Now shopping. With a massive amount of conversion data from Google Ads and Google Pay, they're on the front foot in the agentic commerce era. Between the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), they're outfitting the largest retailers in the world with the technology to integrate with Google and be considered in this new era.

Google came for your wallet in 2018 when Google Pay was introduced, because they wanted to own the transaction layer. The pieces are starting to fall into place: find what you're looking for using our search, organize your life using our apps, discover products through clean integrations, and buy using our rails.

AI commerce is absolutely a thing and will continue to grow. People have used Google and trust them, so that's why they are throwing their credit card into Google Pay. Are they confident enough in OpenAI yet? Time will tell whether the adoption of commerce will fully make it's way to the AI-native search engines. Just over Q1 2026 Walmart and Amazon tested it, then sort of walked it back.

The trust and confidence aren't there yet for consumers, but it will eventually get there with more familiarity.

BUSINESS PROFILES

Google is KING of local businesses and has been the leader in taking brick-and-mortar awareness digital. There are over 200M business profiles globally, and 76% of those are verified. Google Business Profiles was a huge infrastructure play that made sense for a consumer economy, another layer in Google's brilliance of owning the entire digital ecosystem for search and discovery. Google Maps ties it all together, giving consumers the tools to find businesses locally as they navigate from A to B.

When people look locally, 87% of them use Google to find a business, smashing alternatives like Yelp, Facebook, or Apple Maps. Google even empowers businesses to add more and more information to their profiles, furthering its user-generated-content engine.

YOUTUBE

Lastly, YouTube has about 2.72B monthly users, with 1B hours of content watched every single day. Google I/O this year announced Ask YouTube, which basically turns the consumer platform into a new discovery channel by using transcripts to build a closed-loop ecosystem of information.

Reddit is big, yeah, but YouTube is where content creators go. It's where influencers go. It's where people discover hobbies or products that are physical, or talk about ideas where people like to learn through media and not through text.

The addition of YouTube content fueling Gemini is such a game-changer and something that the new players can't compete with. Nobody is creating content in the Anthropic ecosystem; OpenAI is not adding user-generated content. It's such a stark difference, you wonder how they will keep up with Google beyond leaning on partnership deals, crawling, and scraping to keep afloat.

Google is in the driver's seat.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

The reason it's not just the sum of its parts, it's more, is that it's forming habitual dominance.

YouTube's daily active user base combined with Gmail's daily usage creates a "habit loop." Users aren't just visiting Google for specific, one-off searches; they're living inside the environment.

The AI multiplier: the rapid adoption of AI Mode (reaching 1 billion users in its first year, if you trust that) shows Google is successfully transitioning its massive existing user base into conversational commerce.

Because these users are already logged into Gmail and YouTube, the AI has a 360-degree view of their preferences, enabling the kind of highly personalized "agentic" shopping assistance that a standalone search engine or chatbot can't match.

And lastly, monetization efficiency. Because Google captures the user from the inspiration phase (YouTube) through the research phase (Search) to the transaction phase (Gmail and Google Pay), it can offer advertisers a more complete view of the customer journey than any other platform.

It's not that they own one part of what people do online, they own practically all of it.

Not using a Google product as part of your daily online activity feels crazy. Whether it's paying for something with GPay, checking your email, or searching for something, they're part of modern world infrastructure.

So when entrants like the headline-grabbing OpenAIs and Anthropics come onto the scene without these decades of data and experience, you start to wonder what the underlying value is beyond the models themselves. ChatGPT used Google search to fuel its training data. Claude reportedly leans on Brave for search.

When you see headlines about "AI exploding," think about the underlying economy these platforms sit on, and you'll quickly realize it's David vs. Goliath.

I've mapped out the advantage Google has over today's headliners, hopefully painted a picture of why Google isn't going anywhere (short of getting broken up), and made you a little smarter the next time you hear about exploding numbers in the grand scheme of things.