Hey folks, welcome back to Paradox Weekly, a Masters' Union newsletter, where we break down the ideas, trends, and contradictions shaping business today.

Before we start…

Fun fact: In 2020, Chegg was worth $14.7 billion.

For those of you who don’t know about Chegg: It was used by students to get help on their homework.

It was a growing business with predictable revenue.

But last week, the stock was at $0.67, their revenue fell from $716 million to $377 million in two years and they laid off 45% of remaining staff in a single October cut.

Everyone's treating this as an edtech getting disrupted by AI story.

ChatGPT came for homework help and Chegg lost.

In reality, Chegg lost to Google.

Google's AI Overviews started answering homework questions directly at the top of the search page, synthesized from the very content Chegg had spent years creating.

So the traffic Google used to send to Chegg, Google now kept for itself.

Honestly: any homework is now of no value when AI just does it for you. But that’s not what we’re discussing today.

This is a search story, and it applies to every business that gets customers through Google.

For 25 years, the internet ran on an unwritten contract.

You create content, Google indexes it, then sends you traffic, and you monetize the traffic.

That contract funded every media company, content-driven brand, and SEO-dependent business on the internet.

Google has now built a system that reads your content, synthesizes the answer, and presents it before the user ever sees your link.

Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that when AI Overviews appear, clicks to the top result drop 58%.

Pew Research tracked 68,879 real searches and found only 8% of users clicked a result when they saw an AI Overview, compared to 15% without one.

To be honest: AI Overviews are genuinely better for users.

The old internet was bloated with SEO-optimized filler designed to rank, and getting a direct answer is a better experience.

The paradox is that the same innovation that makes search better for you is destroying the economics for every business that creates the content Google needs to generate those answers.

Remember Wikipedia?

The Surfer AI Tracker analyzed 36 million AI Overviews.

Wikipedia is one of the most-cited sources, with over 1.1 million mentions.

Wikipedia's traffic fell 8% year-over-year. An arXiv study estimated 11.5 million fewer daily visitors because of AI Overviews.

The Wikimedia Foundation publicly asked AI platforms to send visitors back as Wikipedia is volunteer-run, with no revenue model and no way to fight back commercially.

Meanwhile, Google's advertising revenue grew over $26 billion in a single year, from $237.9 billion to $264.6 billion during the exact period publishers lost over 600 million monthly U.S. visits.

Google's VP of Search published a blog post claiming traffic to websites is "relatively stable” but she shared zero data.

Every independent study says the opposite.

Google holds 97.38% of search market share in India, much higher than the global average of 89%.

There is neither a Bing fallback here, nor a DuckDuckGo alternative with meaningful share.

If Google changes how search works, Indian businesses don't have a plan B.

AI Mode launched in India on June 24, 2025, their first international expansion outside the U.S.

The product now has 2 billion monthly users, with India as a priority market.

Some founders built a direct line:

When they eventually wound down, it wasn't because of the traffic loss.

Morning Brew did the same thing in the U.S. as they had 4 million email subscribers through a referral program, and sold for $75 million.

Most Indian D2C founders I talk to aren't thinking about this yet.

They're focused on Meta ad costs, which is fair as those are up 30% year-over-year.

But most D2C brands also get 30-40% of traffic from organic search.

So when Google answers "best moisturizer for dry skin" with an AI Overview synthesized from your blog content, you lose the click even though you did the work.

Unless, you’re the recommendation across forums such as Reddit / Quora / other blogs that say you’re the best amongst the lot.

Google built the best search experience in history by making the open internet indexable and rewarding creators with traffic.

Now it's built a system that uses that same content to keep users on Google.

The creators bear the cost and Google captures the value.

The paradox: the same company that made the internet's content valuable is now making it economically unviable to produce that content.

And the better Google gets at answering questions, the worse it gets for every website that provides the answers.

Someone is going to monetise this gap between brands and search visibility.

The companies that survive will be the ones that Google pushes through AI answers.

How much do you focus on organic traffic today?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Pratham