> Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads.

A lot of people already pay for YouTube since the introduction of Premium. Google/Facebook don't push for paid versions of these products because the data from billions of "free" users is more valuable to them than payments from millions of paid users.

If Google search were paywalled (pre-AI) the most likely outcome would be a separation of consumers into "premium" customers paying for Google, some people paying for cheaper but not quite as good alternatives, and everyone else getting by with the free alternatives. There would also likely be some kind of enterprise tier for indexing your corporate resources or some such.

There's a reason Adobe is still extracting billions from its ~~victims~~ users despite many great free (or reasonably priced) alternatives existing.