Google search is dead and IP is the last moat in an AI world

Executive overview

AI has commoditised search in under 18 months — Google is losing the behaviour, not just market share. The same dynamic now applies to every service, skill, and creative output: technology commoditises faster than businesses can adapt.

The one durable asset left is IP and NIL (name, image, likeness) — everything else, including thinking itself, is becoming a commodity.

• Distribution shifts signal the next wave; whoever reads them first wins.
• Personal brand and blockchain-verified ownership are the hedges against commoditisation.
• Speed and gut-driven decision-making beat analysis in fast-moving environments.

The death of Google search

• 15 months ago, ~10% of audiences said they'd replaced Google with ChatGPT. Now entire rooms stand up.
• Even perfect execution of Gemini won't save Google's core revenue driver — the intent-based search behaviour has moved.
• Google AdWords and SEO are entering the same obsolescence curve as the Yellow Pages.
• Pattern: the same shift happened from Ask Jeeves/Yahoo to Google; few saw it coming then either.

The speed of AI commoditisation

• Previous tech waves (web 1.0, web 2.0, social) gave years of runway before competitors caught up.
• AI competes on a cycle of hours, not years — a breakthrough LLM can be obsoleted within the same afternoon.
• Signing a one-year lock-in deal with any AI platform is high-risk because of that speed.
• Even the best pattern-recognition thinkers are struggling to make correct key decisions because of commoditisation velocity.
• The technology commoditises everything — including critical thinking.

IP and NIL as the endgame

• If AI fulfils its promise, the only protected assets are intellectual property and name/image/likeness.
• Blockchain becomes more important, not less, as AI scales — it's the verification layer for deep fakes and content provenance.
• Every piece of content going forward should be timestamped on-chain so audiences can verify authenticity.
• NFTs are not dead; 99% will go to zero (as with sneakers, art, trading cards), but the 1% with genuine IP behind them will be worth a fortune.
• Creator-owned CPG brands (the Poppi playbook) are the commercial expression of this: distribution and media are now free, so the brand IS the moat.

Reading distribution shifts

• Every major societal change — printing press, radio, TV, internet, mobile, social — was a distribution change first.
• Whoever captures attention on the new distribution channel wins; everything else (fame, geopolitics, commerce) follows.
• The printing press defaulting to religious books explains religion's continued foundational role in society — distribution shapes culture permanently.
• Facebook Glasses (Project Orion) arriving in ~6 years are likely the next television-scale shift.
• Tactical signal: check the App Store top 100 free/paid apps daily — it's a real-time map of where consumer attention is going.
• The shift from "social media" (follow graphs) to "interest media" (algorithm-curated by topic) is already complete.

Building a personal brand in a technical audience

• Personal brand is not a prerequisite for business success, but it is a moat if you want one.
• LinkedIn and YouTube Shorts are the right channels for a technical/founder audience targeting talent and fundraising.
• Algorithms now transcribe speech and match it to interested audiences — depth of content matters more than charisma.
• Insecurity is the primary reason most people fail to build audience; three views feel worse than not posting.
• You don't need to be Logan Paul — you need the weight of genuinely deep knowledge in your words.

Knowing when to persist or quit

• There is no reliable signal; the people who quit one day before a breakthrough are as common as those who should have stopped years earlier.
• Pattern recognition helps but isn't universal — and even experienced operators misjudge timing regularly.
• The more useful frame: get comfortable with the bed you made, move fast, and let speed compensate for mistakes.
• Intuition (gut) is likely the primary decision-making system; training yourself to trust it and move quickly is the practical skill.

The future of marketing and service businesses

• Service businesses have 36 months to adapt before commoditisation of execution is complete.
• Strategy and creativity will be the surviving outputs; media planning and execution are automatable now.
• Large platforms (Google, Meta) have the data advantage and will absorb much of what agencies currently do.
• However: political, financial, and organisational inertia means the transition will be slower than the technology implies — fax machines and AOL dial-up still generate revenue.
• The founders most likely to win are thinkers — unless thinking itself gets commoditised, which is the open question.

Kindness as a business strategy

• Long-term business success requires continuity in relationships; transactional behaviour optimises for short-term wins at the cost of compounding trust.
• The Steve Jobs model — professional genius paired with poor human behaviour — actively harmed the next generation by making meanness seem like a prerequisite for success.
• Kindness is not soft; being the bigger person when confronted with bad behaviour is the harder skill.
• AI advancing medicine is the underrated humanitarian argument for the technology: extending healthy life by decades dwarfs any near-term job displacement.

Tokenised attention and creator economics

• YouTube and Meta currently capture the majority of value creators generate, but creators couldn't exist without that distribution — the economics are a fair trade for most.
• Blockchain enables a future where creators capture their own attention economics directly.
• The same greed that crashed internet stocks in 2000 and NFT prices in 2022 obscures genuinely important underlying technology in both cases.
• AI-generated influencers will do to human influencers what influencers did to Hollywood — the people who own the IP of those characters will build the next Disney with a fraction of the headcount.