> Google search counts are rising, not falling, up maybe 12-13% in the last year.

1. Is this actually true? A lot of stuff now counts as a 'search' in Google's results that wouldn't before. Google phones randomly deciding that you pressed slightly too long on your photo and wanted to do a search on the image content. Looking up the price of a stock and it searches up news and question suggestions that you didn't ask it to. AI agents doing searches for themselves (but not buying anything from ads). Various things you might call 'zero-click' behaviours.

2. Google's market share of search is trending down from 2019 (92.6%) to 90%.

3. stridec.com - Google search traffic declining

This SEO firm suggests, August 2026:

"Google search traffic is down across most measurable categories in 2026. The decline is real, uneven, and driven by four interacting forces — not one. Some of the loss is structural; some is cyclical; some reflects a permanent shift in how people interact with information."

There are a bunch of stats mentioned in this article that would suggest Google's 'you search, we show ads, we charge the ad person money' model is in trouble.

Certainly, I'm googling less and less myself, and I was a kind of a power-user of google before.

TRS