also referred to as: alphabet
includes Google Search, Google Chrome, Google Docs, Google Cloud, Google Trends, Google Sheets, Google Stadia, Google Glass, Google Meet, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Nest and 23 more
118 statements across 53 episodes · 15 bullish · 34 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Oct 11, 2020 by Benedict Evans · said 821 times in 93 episodes since 2020 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Benedict Evans (774), Toni Cowan-Brown (33), Bernadette Kevins (8), Lillian Li (3), Jeremy White (1), Jay Goldberg (1), Benedict Catton (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 41 mentions in 7 episodes 6 per episode
2025 42 mentions in 4 episodes 11 per episode
2024 110 mentions in 10 episodes 11 per episode
2023 139 mentions in 13 episodes 11 per episode
2022 205 mentions in 25 episodes 8 per episode
2021 182 mentions in 24 episodes 8 per episode
- Trying to understand Ad Tech
- Paying attention to Apple again
- App stores: arguing like it's 2009
- 'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- Tech in china, from inside and outside
- Games and Roblox
- The Business of publishing
- How to think about tech
- 16 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 102 mentions in 10 episodes 10 per episode
Everything said about Google, oldest first
Oct 11, 2020 neutral
Evans: Lacking a US privacy regulator, Apple and Google write the rules
“The US doesn't have a privacy regulator. And so Facebook, Apple on one level, you know, Apple and Google are remaking the ad tech industries. And so they're doing privacy regulation. Apple is doing privacy regulation and what you can do on the phone. Facebook …”
Nov 2, 2020 bearish
Evans: A DOJ antitrust win against Google Search will have little effect
“And I think this is the problem with the DOJ's case on search distribution, which is even if they win, it's not really going to have much effect.
Because it's, A, it's not actually getting at the levers of power.
It's quite a long way away from the actual sear…”
Nov 2, 2020 negative
Nov 2, 2020 negative
Evans: Microsoft's calls to regulate Google are self-serving
“One of them is of course that when Microsoft says that you should regulate Google, they're being tremendously self-serving. When Microsoft says, ah, regulation had a big effect on us and you should do it to Google now. You can't just take that at face value as…”
Nov 2, 2020 negative
Evans: Broad omnibus tech regulations like the EU's DSA cannot work
“The alternative is the Digital Services Act, which just tries to define, like, the entirety of the tech industry.
As being covered by a standardized set of rules, and it just doesn't really work.
I mean, trying to cover how Amazon treats its suppliers, it's at…”
Nov 9, 2020
Evans: Content moderation is unscalable without architectural constraints
“The creation of bad stuff is fundamentally infinitely scalable, because it's people. It's four billion people saying, retweeting stuff that fits their prejudices. And the content moderation or the virus scanning is fundamentally unscalable, because you're one …”
Dec 7, 2020 negative
Dec 13, 2020 neutral
Evans: Spinning off Instagram or YouTube will not make competing easier
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't make it easier to compete with them. Because the network effects that make it hard to compete with Instagram are part of Instagram. They don't come from it being owned by Facebook. The same thing with YouTube.…”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Evans: The idea that a standalone YouTube would build a search engine is insane
“Like, I genuinely heard somebody say the other day that if YouTube was a separate The company, the first thing it would do would be make a general purpose web search engine and compete with Google. You're out of your fucking mind. That's like saying that if yo…”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”
Dec 13, 2020 negative
Evans: Breaking up Instagram or YouTube would not reduce harmful content
“If Instagram was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on teenage girls looking at self-harm content on Instagram. If YouTube was a separate company, that wouldn't have any effect on the prevalence of jihadi content. That's not a competition proble…”
Dec 13, 2020 neutral
Dec 22, 2020 neutral
Google and Facebook Will Face Regulation Like Banks and Telcos
“You are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank. You know, if you work at Google or you work at Facebook, you are going to have the same kind of scrutiny that a telco or a bank have. And it doesn't really matter if you think you shouldn't. That's just wh…”
Jan 10, 2021 neutral
Jan 10, 2021 bearish
Jan 17, 2021 neutral
Benedict Evans: China tech features horizontal competition, unlike Western vertical champions
“Which is that China has sort of many champions that compete with each other across many fields. Whereas, you know, Google doesn't have an e-commerce delivery business, and it doesn't really have a social network. And Amazon doesn't have a social network or a s…”
Jan 24, 2021 negative
Evans: Google's UX is inherently bad; TikTok's UX is the innovation
“YouTube is a utility that distributes video. But the UX itself, A, it's a Google UX, so Ipso facto is shit, but B, like, the UX is like a utility UX, whereas for TikTok, the whole point is the UX. That's where the innovation is, and the UX is pop culture.”
Feb 7, 2021 negative
Feb 14, 2021 positive
Evans: TikTok's innovation is its discovery mechanics, not the video format
“The new thing about TikTok is the swiping and the recommendation. So it's the, you could call that a network, but it's the mechanics that you build around how you show people what the video is. As opposed to YouTube, which is a basically a very desktop, very l…”
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Mar 7, 2021 neutral
Evans: Google has systematically made Android more restricted over time for security
“Google has pulled much more towards as a more secure model because they started very open and realized all of these problems. And so Google has been sort of systemically making Android more secure over time and more locked out over time.”
Mar 14, 2021
Evans: The global ad market is $600B with half spent online
“Firstly, here is, like, the global advertising industry this year is probably 606 hundred Fifty billion dollars, and at least half of that is online, and that pays for a very large chunk of all the stuff that we use, including Google and Facebook and Twitter, …”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Distinguishing on-device from server ad profiling is purely theological
“What exactly is the difference between Google knowing you're a woman with young children, and having that on a data center in Oregon, and Apple knowing, and your iPhone knowing that you're a woman with young children, and showing you an ad targeted at women wi…”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Google's post-cookie alternative assigns users to cohorts locally within browsers
“Google's proposal for replacement is that this happens in the browser, that the browser basically builds sort of
Algorithmically determined cohorts.
So there's like 10,015 thousand cohorts, and the browser works out which one of those you're in, but that neve…”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Google and Facebook hold at least two-thirds of online advertising
“So something like half of online advertising is search, which means, mostly means Google. And then like another maybe 10 or 20%, I'm picking these numbers from memory, is Facebook. So Google and Facebook, between them, have at least two-thirds of online advert…”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Jun 21, 2021 neutral
Evans: Tech Workers Outside Ad Teams Do Not Understand Advertising
“My basic thesis on advertising is that no one who doesn't work in ad tech understands any of it. Particularly people in tech. No one in tech who doesn't work on an ad tech team understands advertising. Like no one at Google who doesn't work on the advertising …”
Jun 21, 2021 neutral
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Jun 29, 2021 neutral
Evans: Western tech produces vertical winners, whereas Chinese tech produces horizontal empires
“The sort of text structure in The rest of the world is you tend to have vertical winners. So Google won search, and there's a couple of other people trying to do search. Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-c…”
Jul 13, 2021 neutral
Evans: Tech platforms cannot prevent synthetic media proliferation
“Okay, well, that's fine, but there's 20 Chinese companies that are already making them, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you're just going to have to get, think about what that means. In the same way, like anything could be fake, Google can't stop t…”
Aug 15, 2021 bullish
Sep 20, 2021 bearish
Sep 28, 2021 negative
Sep 28, 2021 neutral
Evans: a16z Never Passed on Deals Fearing Big Tech Competition
“When I worked at Andreessen Horowitz, we saw three or 4000 companies a year. You know, I don't think we ever said, you know, what if Google does this? Or, you know, you can't invest in that because Microsoft might do that or because Amazon might do that.”
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Nov 8, 2021 neutral
Feb 18, 2022 neutral
Feb 18, 2022 positive
Evans: Dozens of massive tech companies do not compete with Google or Amazon
“There's an awful lot of fifty, hundred, two hundred billion dollar tech companies out there. You know, how does that model account for everything from Coinbase to Stripe to Shopify to Spotify to you know, Okta to Databricks to UiPath to, you know, there's doze…”
Feb 21, 2022
Evans: Google Trends shows searches for 'best' overtook 'cheap' over 15 years
“Now my other kind of chart that I always use is Google Trends for best versus cheap. Because what happens is cheap has gone down. It's a classic crossing, crossing lines chart. Cheap goes down, best goes up. Over the last 15 years”
Mar 1, 2022
Evans: Blockchains Expose Running Code and Transactions Unlike Traditional Open Source
“With open source, you could download the code and look at it, but you couldn't see it running inside Google. Whereas with a blockchain computer, you can see the code running and all the rules and all the transactions as they happen.”
Apr 11, 2022 neutral
Evans: Big Tech exits markets that require manual labor instead of software
“They want to turn it, particularly for Google, Facebook, Amazon, they want to turn it into automated self-service software. And if it turns out that you kind of can't do that, and you need a bunch of salespeople, or you need a bunch of offices, or you need a b…”
Apr 11, 2022 neutral
Evans: Google Retreated From Healthcare Over Regulatory and Data Movement Restrictions
“Google tried to do healthcare and got out, because they kind of discovered you were not able to move it to you know, the incentives around, you know, the amount of regulation, the amount of restrictions on what's possible, the way thing, and some of that is fo…”
Apr 11, 2022
Evans: Big tech will not build narrow vertical SaaS because of scale limits
“When you're a company the size of Google or Apple or something there are things that are probably a perfectly good business, but they're just way too small as a proportion of that company for it to be worth, worth you donate it devoting the kind of effort that…”
Apr 11, 2022 negative
Apr 11, 2022 neutral
Evans: Google handed home security to ADT to avoid physical installations
“And a much more recent example is Google handing off its home security product line to ADT. And the theory was that you could turn home security from these boxes that, you know, somebody in a pickup truck comes with a ladder and spends all afternoon putting bo…”
Apr 25, 2022
Apr 25, 2022 bearish
Evans: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
May 2, 2022 bullish
May 26, 2022 neutral
Aug 1, 2022 negative
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Aug 1, 2022 negative
Evans: Mozilla would go out of business without Google search payments
“And the second problem is, of course, that almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from this. And so if Google stops doing this, Mozilla goes out of business by default, and there's no competitive web browser, or the main competitive web browser, the main compet…”
Aug 1, 2022 neutral
Aug 1, 2022 neutral
Aug 15, 2022 neutral
Aug 23, 2022 neutral
Evans: Modern tech company returns occur mostly in private markets pre-IPO
“Tech companies of the eighties and nineties, like 80 or 90% of the returns to investors came in after the IPO. Let's say IPO at a hundred million dollars, and then they end up being a fifty billion dollar company. Whereas for something like Google or Facebook …”
Sep 5, 2022 bearish
Evans: Apple and Google suffered a complete strategic failure in TV
“This is another piece of the story is Apple and Google sort of complete strategic failure in TV. What Apple and Google wanted to do and what Apple wanted to do with the Apple TV and indeed with the Apple TV app they have now. And remember the Apple TV original…”
Sep 5, 2022 positive
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Sep 5, 2022 negative
Nov 29, 2022 bullish
Evans: Amazon ad revenue makes it a top-four global media owner
“And they did, I think, thirty one billion dollars last year, and they've done like 36, thirty seven billion dollars in the last 12 months which gets them to being like a top three, top four media owner. Globally. It's like Alphabet, Meta, ByteDance and then I …”
Nov 29, 2022 positive
Evans: Amazon's ad business almost certainly creates more cash flow than AWS
“So it's got to have at least the same margins as Alphabet, which is like 60% operating margin if you exclude the R&D. And there's no CapEx. There's no incremental CapEx. So this thing is almost certainly producing significantly more cash flow than AWS.”
Dec 5, 2022 bearish
Evans: AI answers create an economic dilemma by eliminating ad-generating clicks
“If we just give you the answer, then you're not clicking on an ad. And there's always that tension of like, what's the real estate here? Do we show you the answer when you click on it? If I said, oh, what's the best right to do this? You just, you give me a li…”
Dec 11, 2022 neutral
Jan 30, 2023 neutral
Evans: Generative search acts as a synthesizing librarian, not an index
“Google started, is the internet was a library, Google was the index, and you could go and you could find the thing you wanted.
If you go to the librarian and say, what's a good book about this?
And the librarian would tell you, and you would go and you would…”
Jan 30, 2023 neutral
Brown: Learning prompt engineering mirrors learning to search on Google
“Just how we had to learn how to search on Google and find the best results and what are the best questions to ask to get the best results. Now you're seeing people learn, okay, what does a proper prompt look like? What does a really good prompt look like?”
Jan 30, 2023 negative
Evans: Statista is search spam that Google should remove from its index
“The first link, which was Statista, which is spam that Google should take out of the index, and Statista had got a number that was just wrong, and it wasn't like, I disagree with that number, it's like, no, there are not eight billion people on Earth with a mo…”
Feb 6, 2023
Feb 12, 2023 positive
Feb 12, 2023 bullish
Evans: Radically new AI UX will reset default consumer search habits
“Presume that the chat GPT will be 10% worse than Google. I mean, maybe not, maybe it'll be 10% better, but the point is consumers will not care anymore. They will, the experience will be so different that you'll kind of reset people's presumptions and people's…”
Feb 12, 2023 bearish
Evans: AI search answers will drain web traffic from lifestyle publishers
“But if I'm going to say, you know, write me an itinerary for hotels, restaurants, and architecture in Barcelona, I'm going to get, that's going to produce less click-through, and so that's going to be less traffic for Condé Nast Traveler, it's going to be less…”
Feb 12, 2023 bullish
Feb 12, 2023 neutral
Feb 12, 2023 neutral
Feb 12, 2023 positive
Feb 12, 2023 neutral
Evans: Asbestos lawyer queries are historically search's most valuable terms
“This has been the most valuable search term since forever because it's personal injury. So you've got it, you get a lawyer, you sue, the lawyer makes a lot, you make, you get a big payout, the lawyer, it's a lot. So this has been one of the most valuable searc…”
Feb 12, 2023 neutral
Evans: ChatGPT's natural language presentation creates an illusion of certainty
“But if you go to ChatGPT and you ask it a question, it gives you one answer, and it presents that in natural language, which looks, which creates this impression of certainty. This is this phrase, it's a confident bullshitter. It might have exactly the same de…”
Feb 12, 2023 neutral
Mar 12, 2023 neutral
Evans: Google search intent shifted from price comparison to product discovery
“It used to be that, that, that cheap was high. Cheap has gone from high to low. Best has gone from low to high. And the story, the hypothesis here is that people used to use the internet for a price comparison. You already knew what you wanted. You went to Goo…”
Mar 12, 2023 neutral
Evans: Legacy Gatekeepers Held More Power Than Google or Amazon Do Today
“They were old gatekeepers, and they were generally much bigger and much more powerful than Google or Amazon which is kind of a counterintuitive thing to say, but, you know, we came from a world in which there were three TV stations, and mostly Most cities in A…”
Mar 12, 2023 bearish
Mar 20, 2023 neutral
Evans: Amazon and YouTube have successfully unbundled Google Search for specific queries.
“Clearly both Amazon and YouTube have unbundled Google in that sense that you go to Amazon for product and you go to YouTube for not just for quote unquote video, but for a lot of other stuff that might previously have been text.”
Mar 27, 2023 neutral
Evans: AI summarizing news without links raises deeper issues than search engines
“If you're going to, you know, build a new system that will just tell you what the story was without linking or giving you credit, that's very different from you know, what Google and Facebook do, which is you search for a new story and they tell you where to r…”
Mar 27, 2023
Evans: Incumbents treat AI as a feature, but disruption requires new products
“The incumbent's always trying to make the new thing a feature. And so that's very obviously what's happening with Microsoft and Google, including this in PowerPoint and office and of course in search and everything else. But what actually happens is, is then p…”
Apr 24, 2023
Evans: Google did not invent search advertising
“Search advertising wasn't invented by Google, it was invented by somebody else, and they presented, I think it was at a TED talk, and everyone started booing, and they thought this was evil, like, you're corrupting search results. You're letting pay to people …”
Apr 24, 2023 bullish
Evans: Generative AI does not destroy search advertising economics
“I mean, this is kind of, you know, like the kind of the, like the first five minute reaction to GPT, 3.5 is this is a catastrophe for search advertising, which you kind of pull back and think, well, it's already not actually, you know, if I get, I can go to ch…”
Apr 24, 2023 negative
Evans: Publisher link tax demands against Google and Facebook are flawed
“And this is, in many ways, just a kind of, it's one of those arguments that just sort of disintegrates as soon as you poke at it, in any way at all, because they don't argue with, they don't, they think they're the only people that should get paid, not anyone …”
May 1, 2023 negative
May 1, 2023 negative
Benedict Evans: ChatGPT's chat UI deceptively implies definitive answers
“To me, this is part of the challenge of ChatTPT versus Google is that Google says here are 10 links that might be the answer. Whereas ChatGPT says this is the answer, and it's, this is the answer. But it's not, you could argue that what it should be saying is …”
Oct 29, 2023 negative
Dec 17, 2023 bullish
Feb 16, 2024
Mar 3, 2024 neutral
Apr 1, 2024 neutral
Evans: Generative AI had four primary use cases in 2023
“It seems to me that there were sort of four use cases. Use case one is coding. Secondly, brainstorming and suggesting ideas. Thirdly, and this is more like a corporate thing, knowledge management pointed at an internal corpus of thousands of documents or PDFs …”
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024 negative
Competitors cannot afford to match Google's default search distribution payments
“Well, no one can afford to match what Google's paying and even Bing, because in fact their monetization per search is worse for the same reason that their search engine results are worse, and no startup could afford to spend a billion dollars a year building i…”
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Aug 19, 2024 negative
Spinning out Android as a Google antitrust remedy is structurally irrelevant
“Spinning out Android to me is, like, completely irrelevant, because, like, read back what I just said, like, if Android's a separate company, that's not, why is it going to choose Bing? It's going to have the same decision process that Motorola does.”
Aug 19, 2024 negative
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Programmatic display advertising accounts for only 10% of Google's total revenue
“There's another case coming down the pipe for Google on the display side the programmatic advertising, display advertising side which is, will be, is only 10% of revenue, but, you know, it might be more consequential on that side.”
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to prevent vertical query routing
“And Apple is being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to do anything else here. So they're being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to say this is a hotel's query, maybe we'll send you straight to booking.com. They're being paid twenty billion dollars …”
Aug 19, 2024
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Aug 19, 2024 neutral
Aug 21, 2025 positive
Aug 21, 2025 bearish
Evans: Lack of network effects makes ChatGPT's early lead fragile
“Given that there's no network effects, or don't, or not yet any network effects in LLMs, that feels very fragile. Like, you know, if you remember, you know, I cannot, you know, remember, like, everyone used Yahoo, and then everyone switched to Google, because …”
Nov 16, 2025 neutral
Evans: Big companies run 10 to 20 AI pilots without systemic clarity
“Every big company now has had, like, 10 AI presentations. They've had one from Microsoft and Google, they've had the one from their ad agency, they've had the one from Bain or BCG or McKinsey, they maybe had one from OpenAI, they've had stuff from Accenture, a…”
Nov 16, 2025 neutral
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
Feb 28, 2026 bearish
Evans: OpenAI and Anthropic lack distribution and cannot out-innovate startup ecosystem
“You don't have the existing feature set that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and everybody else have where they can add it and Salesforce and, you know, Workday and, you know, Figma and everyone else, some of them, some of which will survive…”
Jul 15, 2026 positive