• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 10, 2024

Google claims competition thrives in search and advertising -- one defense being used against its U.S. Department of Justice trials. 

That defense may have been less convincing prior to the launch of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, TikTok, and Amazon, when it mostly had Microsoft Bing to contend with.

In a recent filing, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed it was considering asking the court to break up Google. The DOJ listed a range of remedies that would restrain Google’s market dominance. Some options for change include putting an end of default search agreements, requiring Google to allow sites to opt out of AI training but remain in the search index, adding ways to become more transparent, licensing and syndication of its ad feed, and forcing data sharing with competitors.

Companies across the search and advertising supply chain want change, which became clear in the latest report from the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and several associations that measured the entire digital ad spend to estimate the fraud rate for invalid traffic (IVT).

Transparency is one concern being challenged in Google’s trials. The report stated the importance of the “industry’s ability to peer into search and other closed-off walled gardens continues to cause concern. Even if MRC-accredited solutions exist in those closed-off channels, the inability to independently measure and benchmark creates transparency issues.”

Attempting to provide more features for free, especially in AI, Google this week announced a significant update to its Gemini AI platform by launching Imagen 3, an advanced text-to-image generation model. It made it available to all Gemini users worldwide. 

Google’s market share has slowed, according to data from Emarketer. Amazon is forecast to take 22.3% of the market this year, growing 17.6%, compared with Google’s 50.5% share and 7.6% growth.

Emarketer estimates Google U.S. search ad revenue will rise from $62.8 billion in 2024 to $67.6 billion in 2025. Amazon in the U.S. is expected to rise from $27.7 billion in 2024 to $33.8 billion in 2025. Apple is estimated at $6.3 billion in 2024, rising to $7.3 billion in 2025.

Estimates from Emarketer include advertising running on desktop and laptop computers as well as mobile phones, tablets, and other internet-connected devices. It also includes contextual text links, paid inclusion, paid listings such as paid search, and SEO; net ad revenues after companies pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to partner sites.

Worldwide, that number is growing for Google based on Emarketer’s estimate of $156.2 billion in 2024, rising to $168.4 billion in 2025. Microsoft comes in at No. 2 -- far behind with $7.3 billion in 2024, and $7.8 billion in 2025.