Summary of the episode on whether Google will win the AI race:

In this episode of Friday 15, Brian and Andy explore whether Google is emerging as a winner—or facing existential risk—in the rapidly intensifying AI race. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the market leader, the discussion highlights mounting evidence that Google’s Gemini is gaining momentum fast. Gemini’s monthly active users reportedly jumped from 450 million to 650 million in a short period, while Google’s stock has surged dramatically, signaling investor confidence tied directly to its AI advances.

They argue that Google’s biggest advantages are structural: unmatched data, massive infrastructure, and an enormous installed user base already accustomed to searching within Google’s ecosystem. Gemini’s larger context window, improving reasoning, and deeper engagement metrics suggest it is closing the gap with ChatGPT and, in some areas, surpassing it. However, Google faces a major dilemma—AI-powered “zero-click” answers threaten its core advertising-driven search business, forcing it to cannibalize its own revenue model.

Ultimately, the episode concludes that while OpenAI benefits from focus and first-mover perception, Google appears to be “supercharged” by AI rather than disrupted by it. Most practitioners surveyed believe Google is positioned to win, even as monetization remains the defining uncertainty.

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome everyone to Friday 15. My name is Brian Beck. I’m here with Andy Hoar from Master B2B, our weekly podcast, LinkedIn Live and Global Intergalactic session. Today we’re talking about AI. Andy, welcome to Friday.

We’re talking about AI. We’ve never talked about that before.

No, it’s either Amazon or AI. seems like this this last couple months, right? One or the other because there’s so many minds, right?

Well, this is an exciting session we’ve got to talk about today, folks. Um what’s happening in the world of Google and AI and how it’s relevant to all of you as practitioners and your world of trying to optimize and stay relevant to your customer. You know, Friday 15 is our weekly podcast and we’re excited to to be with you today. Now, of course, Andy, as usual, we do our breaking news, and today we’re talking about, let’s see, AI. Open AI declares code red. As Google threatens their AI lead, Gemini user base has been climbing Gemini’s user base, which is Google’s AI. Since the August release of an image generator, Nano Banana, and Google said monthly active users grew from 450 million to 650 million in October.

So, OpenAI is facing pressure from Anthropic, Gemini, across the board here, Andy. What’s your reaction? I mean, is is and this is kind of our overall theme here. This was in the Wall Street Journal this week. What what do you think? Yeah.

Well, you know, they need to co call a code red because I think people could argue that they’ve gotten a little bit distracted. They got tons of partnerships. They still are the biggest dog in the race. We’ll see some numbers around this that they have 800 million active users, right? So when Gemini goes from 450 like halfway there to 650 uh oh the trajectory doesn’t look so great for open AI and we were talking before the show here that there’s an interesting analogy here.

Yeah. Is open AI is chat GPT going to be the Netscape browser space because there’s so many interesting parallels. They had a ton of money. They were the first mover. They were the consumer product, right? And they were up against Internet Explorer, which was offered by Microsoft going back in the history books here. They had far greater resources, a larger install base, right? And what ended up happening was Microsoft rolled over on them and Netscape really sort of disappeared. Uh, could that happen to Open AI? Different Friday 15 perhaps. Maybe OpenAI raised 58 billion dollar, Andy. 58 billion. But guess how much they’re spending? $50 billion a year. Oh my god. On a market that people kind of estimate is in the hundreds of billions of dollars in terms of universe when if you think about it, I think the number I’ve seen is that basically these these AI companies are spending something in the order of like $3 trillion on a on infrastructure. So they’re spending $3 trillion on a market that right now right now has a universe and a ceiling of 300 billion. Okay, do the math there. Three trillion 300 billion. Either that either the $3 trillion number has to come down or and this is what everybody’s betting on the $300 billion number is going to go up because it’s going to spread throughout the organization and AI everything. So that that total available universe has got to increase or we’re looking at a bust. All right.

Well, we’ll see. I I think it’s going to evolve. But Andy, we had Nostradamus on our predictions uh webcast last week uh where we talked about our 2026 predictions. I guess of course it’s all about was all about AI, but Nostradamus, Mr. Justin Raldi from Safety, Speed Manufacturing. Did I say that right? I I never get his company name right. Anyway, he said Google finally has a real competitor. That’s what he said. Is Google winning or losing the AI space? And that’s our topic today. Is is goo how is Google going to fare in this world? I mean, you know, for years, Andy, we would spend all of our time, you know, as practitioners working on SEO, search engine optimization, making sure we were relevant for Google’s natural search algorithms and making sure we showed up high in the search results. Well, it’s all changed now. And, you know, is Google going to win? And where do you put your dollars and efforts? If you’re a practitioner, where do you put your efforts now? You how do you manage this? And you know this what happens to Google is a big is a big uh you know uh element here. It’s it’s important. So what’s going on with Google?

I mean we look at their stock price. What’s what’s going on here? It’s crazy. Market likes them. Yeah. So below the radar for a lot of people who aren’t stock watchers, uh Google’s price, it’s it’s uh Alphabet, right? Yeah. um has doubled in just the last 6 months, which is hard for a company to do when it’s worth $1.9 trillion to double to $3.8 trillion in six months. Wow. Why? But, you know, I thought, all right, well, maybe the entire market has been going up. All of the tech market has been rising. And so, this is just mirroring a trend. Oops. Microsoft stock has gone a sectionally sideways, right? Um it has gone nowhere. It’s gone up uh I think it says 2% something like that. Yeah. Yeah. 1.8 1.08%. Yep. Yeah. So it’s barely gone up and Microsoft’s been a high performer. Uh so it isn’t the industry at large. It is Google specifically. And if you look at the next slide, yeah, if you just isolate for the last two months or so, look at that increase. Wow. It was at the 40% level like two and a half months ago and then it’s up at 75%. Yep. In the last two to three months. So what’s happened in the last couple of months?

Well, you mentioned it at the very beginning. They released Nano Banano which is their generator and very importantly Gemini 3.0 which has done pretty well. I think you could see if you look at a couple slides, you know, this is a thing from just a couple months ago. Which of the following AI tools have you used in the past 30 days? It’s showing a pretty distinct trend here. Open AI again still in the lead, but look who’s in second place. Yeah. Right. Um, and these are usage numbers. Next, on the next slide, you’ll see that, you know, not only is that the case, but also, uh, people are spending more time on Gemini. So, this is just from like a month and a half ago. Gemini users spend more time chatting than those rival chat bots. Look at the red line. It’s above chat GPD and Claude. So, people are using it more. They’re spending more time on it. This is a bad trend for anybody other than Google, I think. Well, those of you listening, it shows that Gemini uh people are spending almost well, I guess about seven minutes chatting per visit versus chat GPT, which is down closer to six minutes. So, yeah, I mean just a utility thing. Is that is that because Andy though playing devil’s advocate, it’s less efficient or is it just engaging? It’s that or it takes longer. It’s less right. It could take longer also. S

o, and so we we declared on our predictions, we I said, “Hey, Google is not relevant. They have to eat their own business model. They’re, you know, their ad revenue is going away. They’re these these new competitors.” Nostradamus told us they finally have a real competitor. And Mr. Dan Hec from CDE Fasteners said, “You guys are crazy.” Well, me anyway. He said, “I’ve used he said, “I’ve used Chat GPT every day for three years. Just spent two hours on Gemini 3. I am not going back. The leap is insane. Reasoning, speed, images, video, everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed again. Right. So that’s actually that wasn’t Dan. That was Mark off. Right. Yeah. He’s he’s saying said something very similar like you guys like you said you’re crazy if you’re not using it. You know it’s not it has a something called a context window. that it was also in that note is that Gemini’s context window is to put it in perspective. It is like five times the size of Claude. Wow. And like basically five times the size of ChatGPT mean it can it can take more information in. It’s less expensive. It’s more efficient with tokens checking all these boxes. And I think there’s this test that we were talking about earlier. I think it’s a vending machine test where they tell an AI, hey, how would you run a vending machine business? and and it’s kind of like the touring test for these AI bots. And apparently Gemini has done much better the most recent release.

Now, let’s be fair here. These things come and go. You know, ChatGPT declared a code red. Maybe their next iteration comes out and blows Gemini away. But but there are some bigger issues at stake here. And if you see on the next slide, uh this is what’s happened in the last year. Again you for those who can’t see this it’s basically traffic AI traffic share and a year ago open AI chat GPT was like about 80% right and remaining 20 or maybe 85% the remaining 15% or so was split among seven or eight other big players like Gemini remember Deepseek the Chinese coming where did that go gro claude you know but they’re yeah But if you fast forward to today again, Chat GPT is still in the lead 75% but that number has come down from say 85% to 75% and the big winner here has been Gemini. Yeah. Yeah. So it does beg the question what do we what’s really happening here? And so you and I thought okay let’s take a look at this because this does impact B2B because B2B companies are using these technologies. Of course. Yeah, you know, how much is this going to change things? And so we put together kind of a pros and cons list and we should have a conversation about this one. All right. Will Google win the LL LLM game?

So basically the trajectory shows that it’s doing pretty well, right? And what are the arguments for and against? So what are the arguments for Brian? Well, for you know AI chatbots are in Google’s DNA, right? And and they have just plain and simple more data to train on. This is the same thing that you know you look at meta and there’s some interesting uh statistics about meta but also Amazon and others. There’s just more data and more storage space. I mean they just have more capability, more infrastructure. But I think the big thing Andy is their install base, right? I mean the the amount of people that already have the, you know, the the browser, the the capability, the familiarity with Google, etc. that I mean we talked about this pregame that is really their advantage, right? uh versus anything else uh versus versus an open AI which is you know it’s a new it’s a new tool it’s something different and it’s a different place for people to go you know people Google already has for example on the AEO agentic you engine optimization or answer engine optimization they already have people going to Google right it’s it’s already the traffic is already there they’re serving the answers within the results there’s no change necessary for the for the for the people and if those results are as good for now maybe better than going to a chat GPT you know that’s the the the base is there you know it’s just it’s the same it’s the analogous argument to Amazon moving from Amazon consumer to Amazon business the user is already there they’re already comfortable with using the the the path what do you think?

I think the interesting part with Google though is it’s a sword that cuts both ways because Google has a cannibalization issue they now have to grapple with zero search zero clicks. Sorry. Zero clicks. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. So their model before, as we all know, is you do a search and it shows you organic results which ostensibly are the safe ones that are unpolluted by advertising. And then you get the sponsored results, which is where they make their money with what they call the Chinese math. Onetenth of 1% of all the people who look at a page will pay for something, right? So that’s how you subsize it. Well, with Gemini, they just give you an answer, right? There’s no sponsored result. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I’ve looked at a sponsor result. I don’t remember the last time I looked at an organic result. I just when I go there gives me the answer. That’s called a zeroclick search. So, how is Google going to monetize that? That’s the big question for Google. Oh, man. It’s it’s advertising. It’s coming, man. I It is.

But, you know, will be embedded in that? I mean, there’s going to be a transition period. And it reminds me a lot, not to overextend the analogies here, what Netflix did. Remember Netflix had to cannibalize itself because it was doing the DVD by mail. Right. Right. And then it had to go to, you know, digital. Well, it had to lose that first business in order to gain the second business. The problem is Google’s a publicly traded company. What, 95% of their revenue comes from search. They’re going to have to upend their own model. So that’s the big question mark for Google. But yeah, Catch GBT has some advantages here despite the things we talked about earlier. you know, they had a head start, right? They are perceived to be the winner in the race, although that could go the Netscape route. Um, and let’s not forget, Google does have other businesses to attend to. It isn’t just the search thing, right? They’re in the cloud space, the Pixel, phone, Android, whereas Open AI, at least right now, does one thing. So, it could be that that Code Red Yeah. get them refocused on the one thing they do well and they could roll back over and in two months we could be talking about, you know, chap GPT 5.4 or whatever the hell it would be is even better. Who knows? Well, here’s the thing, Andy. ChatGPT, Open AI does not have to deal with that conundrum of when and how to introduce advertising.

Yes, I am sure I am sure that at Google they are spending lots alphabet they’re spending lots of time how do I monetize this? How do I introduce I mean this is has to be a raging like debate at Google right now like how and when do we do this because no I’m talking about Google introduce both of them really oh I see okay yeah but what I’m saying you know chat GPD’s got got it you know it’s it subscription model but Google you know how and when do I introduce advertising into this mo and it’s a huge risk because if they do that wrong everybody goes you know stays Does that remind you of? Doesn’t that sound like Netflix versus linear TV? Because yeah, I don’t know about you, but I pay for Netflix and all of a sudden I’m watching every show with advertising in it and then I have to pay to get rid of that. That’s the problem that Google’s going to have. Right. Does Google become Blockbuster? Right. And they don’t and they never change. You know, they never intro. Anyway, it’s this is fascinating. It’s changing. That is the big unknown.

You’re right. over the next couple of years is how do both of them grapple with advertising? Well, does Chat GBT or OpenAI even need to introduce advertising? You know, could get away from Yeah, probably they will because they’re not going to get enough subscriptions to pay I don’t know. And then unlike Google where everybody’s used to Google having advertising there, they don’t have to explain that. How’s OpenAI going to explain that one? Hey guys, we were the pure ones. We decided not to do advertising because we wanted you guys to get the right answer. But now we’re doing advertising. It’s all about the customer, man. It’s all about delivering value to the end customer. That’s that’s what that could be a harder fall. It could be a harder fall for chat GPT maybe maybe than it would be for Google where people go, of course, Google’s in the advertising business, but oh wait, chat G chat GPT is now. I didn’t Yeah, I’ll bet chat GPT is waiting to see what or open ads waiting to see what Google will do here, right? and then react to it. I don’t know. If I were them, I’d be waiting. I’d be You make the first move, Google. You do it first because we want to see what happens, right? Yeah. But the problem with that is that uh Google can wait them out because Google’s got tens of billions of dollars and an install base. Look, the the reality is, and this is a little known fact, Google was first to this. Do you remember back in 20 I think it was 2018 this made news because this guy was an engineer at Google who said we’ve achieved uh sentience meaning that the bot is now running on its own and he released this he released this blog or something like that and Google had to say no the guy’s a cook you know he doesn’t represent us he got fired etc. Google had the first version of this and they buried it. Why? Wow. Because it threatened their search business. Now, some would argue that it wasn’t ready yet, but Google was the first one to do this. They buried it and then when ChatGPT came along, all of a sudden within like two months, Google had its own bot. Where did that come from? I can tell you where it came from. They had it. They pulled out of the back room and said, “Oh, yeah. We’ve had this for years.” It may be, man, now it’s a monetization game.

So, this is our opinion, but we can’t get through this without actually asking Gemini and Chat GBT what they think, right? Of course. So, you did that. You asked them what they who’s going to win, what they say. So, Gemini said, “The choice between Gemini and Chat GBT depends on user needs.” And I think this was a backhanded compliment. Gemini may be favored by users in the Google ecosystem who need research and data analysis capabilities, while Chat GPT may be the top choice for creative projects and nuanced conversations. Yeah. Okay. Isn’t that like, well, we’re the real solution and they’re the solution of your art friends, right? That’s the idiot in the bar by themselves drinking alone. That’s chat GBT. Okay. And what did ChatGpt say?

Well, funny enough, you can tell by the answer where they really think. There’s no clear winner yet between Google Gemini and Chat GPT. But I can offer a brief comparison to help explain where Gemini might have an edge and where it might not. But you know, I got to tell you, when I wrote I put this in here yesterday, I was debating whether to put quotes around this and it occurred to me. I’m like, “Wait a minute, this isn’t a human. Am I quoting an AI bot?” Yes. So, so we also had to ask, of course, so that’s fascinating. So, we asked every, you know, ask the AI what they think of themselves. And then we had to ask, of course, our community and of course they said, we said, “Is AI killing or supercharging Google’s s business?”

And of course, overwhelmingly everyone said supercharging. Google’s winning 86% versus uh you know the pure plate LLMs like OpenAI Chat GPT. So I mean clearly the the the the industry at least is our community believes that Google is going to win this game Andy. So fascinating fascinating topic. We’re going to keep watching this obviously. I mean, it’s so so ingrained in everything we’re doing and it has implications for marketing, for process, for efficiency, for how you do business, for your own site search, for everything.

And this this AI stuff is so fascinating. So, we’re going to keep our eye on it. Even even even your organization, who you have in your organization, who you hire and everything, even my son, my goodness, my my son has to learn how to use this stuff.