For a long time, Google represented something unusually attractive to me about the internet.
As a user in mainland China, I did not experience Google merely as another large American technology company. Search, Gmail, Google News and Android seemed to embody a different idea of what software could be: fast, relatively uncluttered, technically ambitious and, at least from the outside, more interested in helping people reach information than in trapping them inside a single product.
That impression became strong enough that the old phrase “Don’t be evil” once felt plausible to me—not as a literal guarantee of corporate virtue, but as shorthand for a product philosophy. Google appeared to understand that trust could be built by making useful things and getting out of the user’s way.
I no longer feel that certainty.
The change did not happen because of a single scandal, failed product or bad search result. It accumulated gradually: more commercial surfaces inside search, products that disappeared after users had invested time in them, repeated reorganizations, and then the strange early experience of Gemini, where one of the companies most responsible for modern artificial intelligence sometimes seemed less capable of turning its research advantage into a product people could trust.
The easy conclusion would be that Google has declined.
The evidence does not support that conclusion.
This is not a story about a company in decline
Alphabet is financially stronger than it has ever been. Its 2025 revenue reached $403 billion, the first time the company crossed $400 billion in annual revenue. Google Search and other advertising revenue grew 17 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2025, while Gemini had more than 750 million monthly active users by February 2026. By May, Google said AI Mode had surpassed one billion monthly users globally, and in the second quarter of 2026 Search revenue was still growing 17 percent year over year.
Those numbers matter because they rule out a comforting but inaccurate explanation for user dissatisfaction. Google is not behaving this way because it has forgotten how to make money, lost the ability to innovate or been displaced by a smaller rival. Its core businesses remain enormous, and its response to the generative-AI shock has become much stronger than the hesitant response many observers saw in 2022 and 2023.
The Washington Post reached a similar conclusion from another direction in 2025. In a comparison of AI search tools judged with the help of librarians, Google’s AI Mode performed better overall than the other systems tested, particularly on recent events and factual questions, while Google’s own AI Overviews performed much less well. The exercise was limited and should not be treated as a scientific ranking of every AI system, but it is enough to undermine the simplistic idea that Google is technically incapable of competing in AI.
That leaves a more interesting question. A company can remain commercially dominant, technically formidable and widely used while becoming harder for some long-term users to trust. Business strength and user trust are related, but they are not the same asset.
The cost of killing a product is larger than the product itself
Google has always been willing to shut things down. This is not a recent discovery.
In March 2013, Google announced another round of what it called “spring cleaning” and said that 70 features or services had been closed since the program began in 2011. Google Reader was among the services retired in that round. The company’s explanation was straightforward: resources are finite, products lose users, and focusing on fewer things can produce better results.
From a management perspective, this is difficult to argue with. A technology company that refuses to kill unsuccessful products eventually becomes a museum of its own experiments.
The problem begins when the relationship between a company and its users moves beyond experimentation.
Stadia is a useful example. In February 2021, Google said it would continue investing in the Stadia platform and described a strategy intended to build a sustainable long-term business around the technology. In September 2022, Google announced that the consumer Stadia service would be wound down because it had not attracted the level of user adoption the company expected. Google handled the shutdown better than many companies would have: it refunded Stadia hardware and software purchases and gave users time before closing the service.
Nothing in that sequence proves bad faith. The business failed to meet expectations, and Google changed direction.
But users learn something from repeated experiences of this kind that does not appear on an income statement. They learn to discount the implied permanence of a new Google product.
That creates what I would call a trust tax. It is not a measured financial statistic, and I am not claiming that research has quantified it. It is a behavioral cost: before investing data, habits, workflows or money into a new Google service, a user may increasingly ask not only whether the product is good today, but whether Google will still care about it several years from now.
For experimental software, that hesitation may not matter much. For products that become part of a person’s digital infrastructure—communication, identity, files, domains, media libraries, automation or business workflows—it matters far more.
The distinction Google has to manage is not simply between successful and unsuccessful products. It is between experimentation and stewardship.
Once people organize part of their lives around a service, discontinuing it can be rational for the company and still impose a cost on the user that changes how the next Google product is perceived.
Search is becoming something different from the product many users learned to trust
Nostalgia can distort this discussion, because old Google was never a public utility. Advertising has funded Search for decades, and Google has been moving beyond ten blue links for a long time. In 2013, the company itself defended direct answers in Search on the grounds that the best search experience should help users act quickly rather than force them to click through pages unnecessarily.
What has changed is the scale and role of the intermediary.
Google’s own description of generative search makes that transition explicit. In 2024, when it introduced expanded AI Overviews, the company described the experience as letting Google do more of the searching on the user’s behalf. By 2026, AI Mode had evolved into a conversational system capable of answering follow-up questions and synthesizing information from multiple searches rather than simply ranking links.
There are obvious benefits. Complex questions can be answered faster, sources can be synthesized, and users do not have to open ten pages to understand a simple issue. Google says these AI features have increased user satisfaction and encouraged people to search more often, and the company has introduced changes intended to surface websites, original reporting and direct links more clearly inside AI-generated search experiences.
The commercial model is evolving at the same time. Google has been expanding advertising into AI search and in May 2026 announced new ad formats for AI Mode, framing them as a way to connect users with relevant businesses while they research products and decisions. The Washington Post noted earlier in the year that advertising was beginning to enter conversational AI products and raised the obvious question: how does the presence of commercial persuasion change the way users interpret an answer that feels more like advice than a list of search results?
That tension is more important than the crude complaint that “Google has too many ads.”
The old search model made the economic relationship relatively legible. Some results were advertisements, others were algorithmically ranked links, and the user usually left Google to read the source.
An AI-mediated search system increasingly interprets the web for the user before the user reaches the source. At the same time, the company providing that interpretation also sells advertising around the interaction and operates services that may compete with the websites being summarized.
This does not mean that Google manipulates every AI answer to benefit advertisers or its own services. There is no evidence that would justify such a claim. It means the user is being asked to place more interpretive trust in a platform whose economic incentives have become more deeply embedded in the same interface.
Regulators have begun treating that structure as consequential rather than theoretical. In the United Kingdom, the Competition and Markets Authority imposed requirements in 2026 giving publishers more control over how their content is used in Google’s generative-AI search features and requiring clearer attribution and access to source content. The regulator had already designated Google as having strategic market status in general search and search advertising.
The significance is not that AI Search has been proven harmful in every case. The significance is that search is becoming a much more powerful mediation layer between the web and the person using it.
That requires more trust, not less.
Gemini exposed a different problem
My early frustration with Gemini was partly emotional because the gap between Google’s research pedigree and the quality of the product felt so strange.
Google had helped create much of the intellectual foundation of the generative-AI boom. Yet after ChatGPT arrived, outside reporting described Google scrambling to convert years of AI research into a competitive consumer product. WIRED later documented the internal urgency of the response, while the Financial Times reported organizational fragmentation and bureaucracy as factors that had slowed Google’s initial reaction. Those reports are interpretations of the company’s internal dynamics, not proof that bureaucracy explains every product failure, but they help explain why a research leader could still be surprised at the product level.
The most visible early failure came in February 2024, when Google paused Gemini’s generation of images of people after the system produced historically inaccurate and inappropriate results. Google’s own postmortem said the model had been tuned in ways that overcorrected for diversity in contexts where historical specificity was required and had also become excessively cautious in refusing ordinary prompts. The company called some outputs embarrassing and wrong.
That episode was real, but it would now be misleading to freeze Google in that moment. Gemini improved rapidly, Google consolidated much of its AI work under Google DeepMind, AI Mode became a major consumer product, and the company regained momentum both technically and commercially. Current usage and financial data do not support a claim that Google simply “lost the AI race.”
That is precisely why I think the trust question survives the technological recovery.
A company can fix a model faster than it repairs a relationship with users. If a person has learned to expect confusing product transitions, short product lifespans or features launched before they feel dependable, each new success starts from a slightly lower baseline of confidence.
The technical problem may be solved in a release cycle. The reputational effect accumulates across years.
Market power does not prove untrustworthiness, but it changes the context
Any criticism of Google has to separate subjective distrust from legal findings.
In 2024, a U.S. federal court found that Google had unlawfully maintained a monopoly in general search and search advertising. In 2025, the court imposed remedies that restricted certain exclusive distribution arrangements and required Google to make some search data and syndication services available to rivals. A separate federal case concluded in 2025 that Google had unlawfully monopolized parts of the open-web advertising technology market, with additional remedies ordered in 2026.
The European Commission has reached related but legally distinct conclusions under the Digital Markets Act. In July 2026, it fined Google for self-preferencing its own services in Search and for restrictions related to Google Play.
None of these decisions proves that Google Search is bad, that its engineers are untrustworthy, or that every product decision is motivated by monopoly power. Antitrust law addresses market structure and competitive conduct, not the emotional relationship between a user and a brand.
But market structure changes the incentives surrounding trust.
A young company that loses users because they stop trusting a product may disappear. A platform embedded in browsers, phones, advertising markets, maps, email, video and web discovery can absorb much more dissatisfaction without immediately losing the relationship.
That does not mean Google can ignore users indefinitely. It means the feedback loop between deteriorating trust and commercial punishment may be weaker and slower than it would be in a genuinely competitive market.
For a company that once gained much of its appeal from appearing to be the cleanest route to the open web, that is a significant change.
The strongest defense of Google is also the reason the criticism matters
There is a serious case in Google’s defense.
Shutting down products can be evidence of discipline rather than contempt for users. Search must evolve because the way people seek information is changing. AI answers can save time. Advertising pays for services used by billions of people without direct subscription fees. Gemini’s early mistakes occurred during the rollout of a genuinely difficult technology, and Google publicly acknowledged at least some of them rather than pretending they had not happened.
The company also continues to build products of extraordinary quality. Gmail did not become useless because Reader died. Maps is not less useful because Stadia failed. Search remains the dominant gateway to information in many countries, and Google’s own data suggests that its AI features are increasing usage rather than driving users away. By 2026, Google was not retreating from generative AI; it was integrating it across Search, advertising, Cloud and consumer products at enormous scale.
That defense should be taken seriously because the interesting criticism is not that Google has stopped being competent.
It is almost the opposite.
The more capable Google becomes, the more important the question of stewardship becomes. A small experimental company can fail fast and disappear. A company that mediates how billions of people find information, communicate, navigate, work and increasingly interact with AI occupies a different position.
Its users are not merely testing software. They are building habits and dependencies around infrastructure.
The standard by which such a company should be judged cannot be only whether each individual product decision makes financial sense.
Trust is not the same as satisfaction
Google frequently publishes evidence that users are satisfied with its products, and those claims deserve to be included rather than dismissed. Search usage is high. AI Mode is growing. Revenue is growing. If millions of people were genuinely abandoning Google in disgust, the company’s results would look very different.
But trust and satisfaction measure different things.
I can be satisfied with Google Search today and still hesitate to build a long-term workflow around a new Google service.
I can believe Gemini has become technically excellent and still remember how quickly Google pushed earlier versions into public use.
I can understand why an unsuccessful service must be closed and still adjust my behavior the next time Google asks me to move data, habits or payments into a new platform.
This is why the “trust tax” is useful as an analytical concept even though it is not a measured statistic. It describes the additional skepticism a company may create for itself when past decisions teach users that usefulness today does not guarantee continuity tomorrow.
The tax is paid in hesitation.
It appears when a user asks whether a new service is worth learning, whether a migration is worth the effort, whether data should be entrusted to the platform, or whether a competing product with fewer features but a clearer long-term commitment might be safer.
A company with Google’s scale can afford a lot of that hesitation before it appears in quarterly earnings.
That does not make it free.
The question Google now faces is different from the one it faced twenty years ago
Google’s early challenge was to persuade people that an unfamiliar company could organize the web better than anyone else.
It succeeded so completely that “Google” became a verb.
The challenge today is more complicated. The company no longer needs to prove that it can build powerful technology. It needs to persuade users that greater power will still be exercised in ways that justify dependence.
That becomes harder when Search is simultaneously an information system, an AI answer engine, an advertising marketplace and a gateway to Google’s own services. It becomes harder when a long history of product closures teaches users to distinguish technical excitement from long-term commitment. It becomes harder when courts and regulators are scrutinizing the market power surrounding the same products whose interfaces ask users to trust increasingly synthesized answers.
None of this means that the Google I once admired was morally pure, or that the current Google is uniquely cynical. The old company also sold ads, killed products, defended its market position and made mistakes. Nostalgia compresses history into something cleaner than it was.
What has changed is the scale of the relationship.
When a search engine is merely a tool, disappointment is easy to escape. When the same company becomes part of the infrastructure through which people search, communicate, navigate, store information, run businesses and increasingly receive AI-generated interpretations of the world, reliability is no longer only a technical characteristic.
It becomes a form of stewardship.
Google may be stronger today than at any previous point in its history. Its financial results, AI adoption and technological reach make that difficult to dispute.
What is less certain is whether the trust accumulated during its earlier years can be spent indefinitely without changing the way users behave.
For me, that change has already happened. I still use Google. I still depend on some of its products. I no longer assume that a new Google product deserves my long-term commitment simply because Google made it.
That is a much quieter criticism than saying the company has failed.
It may also be the more serious one.