Lately there’s been nonstop noise about how AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity are coming for Google’s crown. The posts all sound the same. “No one Googles anything anymore” or “ChatGPT gives me what I want faster.” That’s the vibe. But the facts tell a different story.
Google is the infrastructure of the internet. And now the very AI tools trying to challenge its dominance are facing pushback from the ecosystem they rely on to function. Cloudflare just announced it’s going to start charging large language models that scrape content. That’s a warning shot aimed straight at the future of OpenAI, Perplexity, and every AI platform built on recycled web data.
The only company that isn’t worried is Google. Why? Because they don’t get scraped. They are the scraper. Block Google from indexing your site and you vanish from the internet. Your clicks, your ads, your leads all go dark. And now Google’s starting to flex that leverage.
AI Overviews are already showing up in search. That keeps the user inside the ecosystem while still giving them LLM-like summaries. Gemini, their AI model, doesn’t need to print cash either. They don’t need it to sell on its own. They just embed it inside Workspace, Chrome, Android and every other corner of your life. The distribution engine is already running.
There’s a reason every publisher plays nice with Google even when they’re angry. If you don’t, you get buried. OpenAI and others are trying to do deals with media companies, but Google already did those a decade ago. They’ve got the stick and the carrot. They control the road and the toll booths.
Look deeper. YouTube is arguably the most powerful moat Google owns. It’s the largest searchable video library in the world, and it’s directly tied into search results. Google funnels all video queries to YouTube, and no rival platform has made a dent because of that traffic firehose. Even TikTok loses its edge when users need longform or factual content. Try getting corporate training or university lectures on Instagram. Not happening.
GOOG traded around $189 today with a $2.35 trillion market cap. It’s not cheap, but it’s not cracking either. Social mentions are up over the past two weeks, especially on financial forums like Reddit and X. Most chatter is skeptical, but that skepticism comes from misunderstanding the structure of the internet. Google owns the plumbing, not just the faucet.
If the Big Beautiful Bill and global regulations start charging LLMs for scraping, that helps Google more than anyone else. They already have the data, the distribution, the devices, and the traffic. Everyone else is trying to build that from scratch. And good luck doing it without getting sued.
GOOG doesn’t need to outcode OpenAI. They just need to outlast the hype cycle while turning up the pressure on data access. They’ve done it before. They’ve done it for decades. This time is no different.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice