Their technical progress is indeed impressive. And their price dumping of 2.5 Pro for free will have moved a lot of technical users.
The key question is if the can stop the decline in search or pivot their revenue streams to Gemini.
Is there really a decline in web searches or in Google's usage vs competitors? Seems like one of those greatly exaggerated rumors?
From a personal website, that's been pretty constantly getting 2k hits from Google each week:
Bing 150-200 / week
Yandex ~100 / week
DDG ~50 / week
ChatGPT is now at ~50 hits a week.
So from that data it looks like Google still has their comfortable 80%+ market share. But I think it's interesting if you think about the kind of users that use these products. In my mind, the alternative search engines are used mostly by techies and people that care about their privacy (also often techies), but ChatGPT is used by a much broader slice of the population.
But maybe I'm projecting because my own search behaviour has changed so dramatically with ChatGPT & Claude having replaced a substantial part of my Google searches.
+1
If anything I think their revenue is still growing by double figures (?) which is insane considering we're decades and billions of users into the business.