eMarketer expects Google's share of the US search ad market to drop below 50% in 2025 for the first time in 10+ years, as Amazon, Apple, and others make gains
Biggest US antitrust victory since Microsoft could still be too little … Yahoo Finance : Google's grip on search slips as TikTok and AI startup mount challenge Radhika Saraogi / TipRanks Financial : Alphabet's (GOOGL) Search Ad Lead Threatened by Amazon and TikTok John Ballard / Motley Fool : Billionaires Are Betting Big on These FAANG Stocks, and This $700 Billion Opportunity Explains Why Luke Jones / WinBuzzer : TikTok and AI Search Platforms Challenge Google's Ad Monopoly Richard Windsor / Radio Free Mobile : Google - The back foot — HOME- AI / MACHINE LEARNING- GOOGLE - THE BACK FOOT — Google is on the defensive. Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Roundtable : Google Tests Sponsored Ad Label Variations The Express Tribune : Google testing new feature to identify legitimate businesses Mastodon: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life@mas.to : Google is on track to dip below 50% of the search advertising market in the US. — While the Wall Street Journal hypes up TikTok & AI search engines like Perplexity as the cause, the largest gainer is Amazon which now has 22.3% share followed by the Apple's App Store search ads. … Jeff Jarvis / @jeffjarvis@mastodon.social : Oh, gee, so maybe it's not a monopoly that needs to be broken up.... Google's grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business is loosening as a flurry of new offerings for advertisers hits the market https://www.wsj.com/... X: Eric Seufert / @eric_seufert : Apple is the third largest US e-Commerce retailer. [image] Paul Kedrosky / @pkedrosky : WSJ: Google's share of the U.S. search ad market is expected to fall below 50% next year for the first time in over a decade Anecdotally, I use it much less than ever. https://www.wsj.com/... [image] Ashkan Karbasfrooshan / @ashkan : Google didn't pioneer search ads, Goto/Overture did, but timing helped their superior search product become the dominant platform, reaping all the benefits. But, like all other disrupters, it's being disrupted by social, AI. https://www.wsj.com/... Adam Epstein / @aepstein_ : Amazon's meteoric rise in share of search ad revenue this past decade will be matched in the next decade with a meteoric rise in share of tv ad revenue. [image] Boris Wertz / @bwertz : Few people appreciate how big Amazon's search advertising business has become [image] Aravind Srinivas / @aravsrinivas : Yep, search is going to be disrupted big time in the next five years. [image] LinkedIn: David Wiener : It's hard to overstate what's happening with Google right now. After years of being the dominant gateway to the open web, the tides are really shifting. … Jordan Steiner : Good article from the Journal on Google's search monopoly slipping. When I am researching a new company/industry these days I always start the journey on Perplexity instead. … Forums: r/technology : Google's Grip on Search Slips as TikTok and AI Startup Mount Challenge r/wallstreetbets : Googles grip on search slips to TikTok and AI Startups See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This forecast extends the related coverage identifying a first sub-50% US search-ad-share reading for Google in more than a decade. It marks a change in market mix rather than a claim that Google’s search business is shrinking outright.
The competitive backdrop is broader than traditional web search: Reddit’s apparent limits on non-Google search indexing illustrate how access to useful content can shape search alternatives, while Google has long argued that users choose its products voluntarily in its response to the DOJ’s case.
First-order effects
- Google is forecast to hold less than half of US search-ad spending in 2025, weakening the symbolic measure of its category dominance.
- Amazon, identified as the largest share gainer, and Apple’s App Store search ads stand to capture a larger portion of advertiser budgets; TikTok and AI search startups add further competitive pressure.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers gain more credible search-like inventory beyond Google, increasing the incentive to compare performance across retail media, app-store ads, social discovery, and emerging AI search placements.
- Google faces a sharper need to defend advertiser demand as rival products monetize commercial intent in their own ecosystems, rather than merely competing for general web queries.
Third-order effects
- If the share shift persists, search advertising is likely to be measured less as a single web-search market and more as a set of intent-driven ad surfaces controlled by commerce, app, social, and AI platforms.
- The outcome could reinforce scrutiny of Google’s market power: the later two judicial monopoly findings show that competitive shifts and antitrust assessments can proceed in parallel rather than substitute for one another.
The trend: Search advertising is fragmenting into multiple intent and discovery channels as platforms with proprietary user journeys build their own ad marketplaces.