Revisiting the Real Story of AI and Zero-Click Search (Thinks Out Loud Podcast)

I assume most people know that Google makes almost all of its money from ads. And, in practice, those ads are based on clicks. Paid clicks. That fact means that Google can’t survive in a zero-click world. While that same reality is not (yet) true for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI answer engines, they’re almost certainly going to need some form of ads—again, probably clickable ads—to fund their operations.

For example, ChatGPT alone is planning to invest over 1 trillion dollars in t...