fey is out. men are in
and so are the chin implants
Good morning and welcome back to as seen on
Each time I make it to the end of the week having written three newsletters, I feel unstoppable. My goal for the weekend is to spend as little time in my apartment as possible while also making my way through this tome of a book. It’s my first piece of Georgian literature, and so far so good.
In today’s newsletter, I wrote what Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents are doing to get him out of prison, the latest Ozempic era “body trends” as seen on the runway, updates on Sephora, Rhode, and Rare Beauty, some Stella McCartney gossip, and bunch of other fun Friday news.
But first, some predictions…
A couple of months ago, I asked
to write a piece for the newsletter about what she was seeing in the world of “Search” after she called out something I wrote about Reddit and sent me a very kind voice note explaining why I was wrong. It was quite thrilling.Apart from being one half of the amazing lifestyle newsletter
, Aja has worked in search for over a decade and is currently HubSpot’s Senior Director of Global Growth, leading a 40-person team that drives tens of millions of visits each month from SEO. When she spoke, I listened.Aja’s piece has taken a few forms over the last few weeks, but I finally asked if she would share some predictions for search—what will companies like Google, OpenAI, TikTok, and Amazon look like in the next year? How will they compete, and how will that affect us as consumers? It’s funny because we’ve had to keep adjusting these based on everything that’s happened in the last month—TikTok getting banned then unbanned, DeepSeek, Elon… but I like where we landed.
ENJOY.
Prediction #1: AI answer engines steal more market share from Google.
We’re moving past the “early adopter” stage of the tech adoption lifecycle into the “early majority” — it’s no longer just tech geeks (complimentary) that’ve incorporated SearchGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc. into their day-to-day lives.
ChatGPT now owns ~4.33% of the search market, which sounds trivial before you realize how quickly it’s growing. Bing, which has been around since 2009, owns less than 2% of the search market. The more people use AI answer engines for things they used to Google, the less ad revenue Google can make. And that’s a big problem for Google, because…
Prediction #2: Amazon (and TikTok?) will continue to gobble up Google’s ad dollars, too.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say Amazon will siphon even more searches from Google this year. More than half of people begin their search for a product on Amazon (underscoring once again how smart launching Prime was.)
TikTok’s fate is more up in the air. When Ochuko and I started talking about this issue in December, my hot take was that TikTok wouldn’t be banned. After all, at the time Trump had 14.7 million followers (now he has 15) — and if there’s one thing we know about the president, it’s that nothing compels him like attention. Plus, Trump is, of course, much cozier with Big Tech than Biden and has no problem with authoritarian governments.
He’s suggested he’ll force ByteDance to give up a 50% stake (obviously a much better deal than 100%). If TikTok acquiesces, and Trump’s authority to make this call stands — it’s unclear if he can, constitutionally — TikTok will continue driving at least $6.17 billion to $8.64 billion of ad dollars per year… money that YouTube/Google and Meta would’ve gotten instead.