On the medium term I see another problem for search ads - the raise of AI powered question answering engines. They are accessible through voice on mobile, but probably have much less opportunity for ad revenue. The research grade models are amazing, but deployed models like Google Assistant very far behind. I bet Google is dragging its feet with the deployment of QA technology because the shift is not in their interest. Site publishers won't like it either because they lose a part of the search traffic.
In the meantime a new crop of semantic search + question answering engines appear (like DeepSet.ai's Haystack). It's time to ditch link based results. They are primitive and actually don't work well today.
The voice assistants already do self—advertisement by suggesting other things you can do when you ask for simple things like the time or the weather. At best this is to help people understand what’s possible, and at worst it’s to juice engagement metrics.
In the meantime a new crop of semantic search + question answering engines appear (like DeepSet.ai's Haystack). It's time to ditch link based results. They are primitive and actually don't work well today.