TL;DRGoogle posted its fastest revenue growth since 2022 and still controls 90 per cent of search, but talent defections, rising competitors, antitrust remedies, and its own AI transformation are eroding the foundations of its dominance. ChatGPT has hit one billion users, Bing has reached the same milestone, and DuckDuckGo installs are surging.
Google’s financial performance has never been stronger. Alphabet posted $109.9 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, up 22 per cent year on year, the fastest growth rate in any quarter since 2022, with search advertising revenue climbing 19.1 per cent and queries hitting an all-time high.
And yet the week before these numbers were published, the company’s stock had its worst day in over a year, falling roughly 7 per cent after two of its most prominent AI researchers defected to rivals. The paradox captures the strange position Google now occupies: it is winning on every metric that matters to Wall Street while losing ground on the ones that will matter in five years.
The talent exodus
The departures that spooked investors were not minor hires. Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering who co-authored the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper that introduced the Transformer architecture, left to join OpenAI.
