Predicting the end of Google has become a tired genre. Most of those predictions have been wrong. The Google search box is still the most-visited URL on the open internet, and traditional search volume is still vast.
What is changing is not Google's overall volume. What is changing is which kind of query is moving away from it — and the queries leaving fastest are the ones marketers care about most.
Specifically: buyer-intent queries. "Best X for Y." "Should I buy A or B?" "Top providers of Z in [city]." These are the queries that drive revenue. And they are migrating to AI engines faster than any other category of query.
The trend lines tell the story clearly. Across the queries we track on behalf of clients, AI engine share of buyer-intent traffic has more than doubled year-on-year. Perplexity's share of professional-research traffic has grown faster still. ChatGPT's product-research volume is now measured in hundreds of millions of monthly queries. And these are early-adopter numbers, not equilibrium ones.
Extrapolating with caution, the math points clearly. By 2027, more than half of high-intent commercial research in the UK will start with an AI engine, not with Google. That doesn't mean Google goes away — it means the most valuable query type, the one that ends in a purchase, increasingly happens elsewhere.
For marketers, the implication is not that you can ignore Google. It is that betting your future on Google's organic results is betting on a shrinking slice of the most valuable cake. The brands that diversify their visibility into the AI surfaces that are growing — by name, with measured citation rate — will be the ones positioned to win when the volume completes its shift.
The window to claim that position is open and not crowded yet. That changes every quarter.