We're about to reach the ultimate stage: after massively rotting the web with centralized silos in which they locked up their users before monetizing them, Silicon Valley's billionaires finally don't really want you to go and read the web they've ingested, and prefer you to talk to their AIs. That way, you'll never leave their website.

I think Google knows very well that traditional search is dead, because of SEO and AI. There's no way to give "good" results anymore, because you can't tell if a site is legitimate or just an AI creation.
Since everything that's produced is no longer discernible from AIs, they might as well serve the content themselves: at least they control the AI. Paradigm shift:
"Users only use the first page of Google results"
to "Users only use Google."