For a long time, search has felt like gravity. There’s one center of mass—Google—and everything else orbits around it. If you wanted to find something, you didn’t really think about where to search. You just googled it.
That’s about to change.
The reason is LLMs. They’ve broken something fundamental about the way we think of search. Until now, the assumption was: one engine should cover everything. But large language models make the opposite strategy possible: many engines, each specialized in a narrow area, and each better at that area than any general engine could ever be.
It’s the difference between a Swiss Army knife and a surgeon’s scalpel. Google is the knife—versatile, reliable, good enough for almost anything. But if you need something really precise, you’d rather have the scalpel.
We’ll start to see AI search engines that only do one thing: finance, or entertainment, or medical research, or shopping. And they’ll do it better than the big universal players because they’ll go deeper. A finance search engine won’t just summarize news; it’ll surface SEC filings, market data, tax codes, and maybe even simulate outcomes. A product search engine won’t just give you links; it’ll give you specs, reviews, resale values, and sourcing data.
Google will still be huge, of course. But it will no longer feel inevitable. Just like we don’t say “go to the internet” when we mean “check Instagram” or “watch Netflix,” we won’t say “Google it” for everything. We’ll learn to pick the right engine for the job.
What happens when search fragments this way? A few things. Users get better results. Businesses lose the illusion that SEO is about cracking one algorithm. And the market, which has been flat for years, becomes interesting again.
It’s strange to think that the search market might get bigger by breaking apart. But that’s what’s going to happen. Search won’t be one thing anymore. It’ll be a collection of specialized tools. And once people get used to that, going back to one-size-fits-all will feel as crude as dial-up.