Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report: in 5 years 50%+ of searches will be through images or speech; both global internet adoption and economic growth slowing
Kathleen Chaykowski / Forbes :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest installment of an annual ritual: after last year's slide deck, Meeker's 2016 report pairs two headline claims — a five-year projection that over half of searches will run through images or speech, and evidence that both global internet adoption and economic growth are decelerating.
The companion KPCB release the same day fills in the mechanism: user counts pass 3 billion but adoption is flat outside India, while voice assistants keep improving on word accuracy, latency, and usage rates — the inputs that would have to hold for the multimodal-search call to land.
First-order effects
- Search-dependent platforms like Google face a five-year product deadline: if the projection holds, image and voice queries must become first-class surfaces, not experiments.
- Consumer-internet companies lose their growth tailwind — with adoption flat except India, new-user acquisition can no longer carry revenue plans.
Second-order effects
- With reach stalled, ad money concentrates on monetizing existing users harder; her 2017 follow-up quantified exactly that, finding Google and Facebook took 85% of online-ad growth.
- Voice-assistant builders get a demand signal from the same-day KPCB data — accuracy, latency, and usage all still improving — pushing hardware and OS players to compete for ownership of the query surface.
Third-order effects
- If search migrates from typed keywords to images and speech, the text box stops being the default gateway to intent — restructuring who captures commercial queries and how ads are bought.
- The growth-slowing frame became the recurring spine of every edition through the 333-page 2019 report, and when Meeker returned in 2025 focused on the AI revolution, the multimodal-search question had moved from projection to battleground.
The trend: Internet expansion is shifting from adding users to changing how people query — multimodal input displacing the text box while ad monetization concentrates in fewer hands.