Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Google was formally ruled an advertising monopoly this week. It could potentially be a catastrophic blow to the company that completely upends the web as we know it. A significant component of this case has been Google’s deal with Apple to be the default search engine in Safari. Google pays the Cupertino company nearly $20B a year to maintain dominance on Apple platforms. That is for good reason of course, Apple’s users are some of the most valuable particularly when it comes to ad targeting. But it is also a flagrant way to squash any chance a competitor could have at growing to be a sustainable web search or ad business. Now that the verdict is in officially, I think it is time for Apple to do what has been long rumored. That is, to build their own search engine that powers Safari, Siri, and Spotlight.

An Apple search engine would be a particularly prescient offering given Apple’s rebranding of their various ad businesses to “Apple Ads” making it an umbrella for the various kinds of ad products they have at the moment. It begs the question of whether or not Apple may get into more traditional web ads in addition to the ones on the App Store and in Apple News. There is now a clear opening for them to enter the market, but I do not think they should just expand the ad offerings. They should go full court press and introduce a search engine. As Joe Rosensteel wrote over at Six Colors, the company needs to build on its existing services business and this is one of the ways that they can go about doing that.

As for the product itself, I know there is much hesitation over whether or not Apple could actually produce a good search engine. This is especially the case after the Apple Intelligence debacle and Siri’s long period of neglect. But the beauty of a search engine is that you do not need to necessarily own the whole stack. It would be unlike Apple to go this route, but I think they need to learn to adapt in the new environment they are now operating in. Like DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, Apple should start by using search results from Bing and Copilot while they build up their own database. Package them up in a beautiful Apple-designed user interface with some clean new ad formats, and if need be, build some special tooling to carefully organize the search results in a better way than they would if otherwise seen on Bing. If they wanted to go really crazy, they could leverage their OpenAI partnership and reskin ChatGPT Search too. The company could even charge a subscription for ad-free results or additional features. It also is not like Apple does not have a similar breadth of services as Google on the web. Apple’s search engine could link to various iCloud apps and save your search history to your account. The opportunity is right there in front of them.

Now I fully recognize that giving up a $20B yearly payment from Google is far from ideal, in fact it makes up a substantial part of their current services revenue. But how sustainable is that longterm? I do not think it can be counted on anymore. It is contingency time. While they would have to make up the $20B difference on their balance sheet with Apple Ad sales and Apple Search subscriptions, they would simultaneously be helping Microsoft or OpenAI grow their positions in search, therefore balancing the market a bit better. Google’s dominance in this space needs to be challenged seriously. OpenAI and Perplexity are really the only ones truly taking a crack at it, with Perplexity attempting to be particularly aggressive. But it remains to be seen just how big of a dent they can ultimately put in Google’s market share. While an astronomical number of people are using ChatGPT daily, Google is still overwhelmingly dominant in search. It is going to take an Apple (or an Apple with Microsoft or OpenAI) to truly break Google.