For more than two decades, the internet has had a remarkably consistent starting point: You type something into Google, scan the results, click a link, and eventually buy, book, read, or subscribe somewhere else. That simple process built one of the most profitable advertising businesses in corporate history.
But artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to remove the middleman, and Meta Platforms' (META) new Muse agent offers a glimpse of what comes next. The threat to Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google isn’t that people will suddenly stop searching. It’s that they may stop needing to search.