The problem for Google existed with the infobox at the top of search results. If users get the answer to their query without having to visit the web page where the answer came from, and where Google shows the ads, means that users don't see ads, and that website operators don't get ad revenue. ChatGPT was Google's Kodak digital camera moment. They had internal transformers-based chatbots (that really wanted to send you pizza, for some reason), but deploying that would have cannibalized their existing business model, so in the meanwhile, their lunch got eaten by an outside competitor.