> be me > take wife to see machu picchu > stray cat follows us home, wife wants to keep it > last week of our trip spent changing hotel rooms every day because cat has fleas > cat throws up and shits all over me on train back to Cusco. Throw my clothes away b/c cat excrement everywhere > bribe airline employee to let us take cat on plane back to US. Cat throws up & diarrheas everywhere on plane as well > get cat home to our apartment in Miami. Cat gets fatter and fatter over coming weeks > assume it’s just b/c has access to good food for first time > wake up to strange noises coming from our closet. Cat has multiplied into a 8 cats > kittens are cute but mama cat is ruthless and keeps stashing kittens in random places in the apartment > google it, turns out kittens need to eat every 2 hours or they die. Mama cat is trying to off half her litter > not on my watch > next few weeks wake up every 2 hours 24/7 to: >> search apartment to find the kittens stashed under couches / inside shoes / most absurd places >> weigh each kitten to figure out which ones haven’t eaten >> hold mama cat down and force her to let the runt kittens eat >> try to go back to sleep for an hour, then repeat > all 7 kittens survive but my wife and I go borderline insane from sleep deprivation > try to get them adopted. No one wants the kittens > successfully peddle a few off on friends & family. Have to take multiple flights to different cities just to deliver kittens > 2 yrs later we finally get all the cats out of our lives 2 years of my life I will never get back I’m also now allergic to cats NEVER, EVER let a woman in your life pet a stray cat

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty: This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries Google’s response? Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for A few examples to illustrate: For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact -match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)” The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants) This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future This is now no longer the case At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose