Google's dominance in the U.S. Ad Search Market weakens...Will it break 50% of the market next year?

Google's dominance in a market that exposes ads through search services appears to be diminishing.Google's share of the approximately $300 billion U.S. search advertising market was expected to reach 50.5% this year, according to

research firm Imaketer.

This is down 9.4 percentage points from 59.9 percent in 2018.

In particular, it is expected to account for 48.3% next year, below 50%.

This comes as product searches using Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, have increased significantly.

Amazon, which had a market share of just 10% in 2018, is chasing Google this year with 22.3%, more than doubling its share.

iPhone maker Apple's share is expected to rise slightly from 2.6% in 2018 to 5.1% this year and 5.2% next year, while Microsoft, which has a Bing search engine, is expected to shrink from 6.7% in 2018 to 5% this year and 4.8% next year.

In addition to these competitors, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) analyzed that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and social media (SNS) poses a threat to Google's dominance in the search advertising market.

In particular, TikTok, a short video platform in China, recently began allowing advertisers to target ads based on users' search terms.

TikTok's share of the U.S. digital advertising market is still only 3.4%, but based on this, U.S. advertising revenue was expected to rise 38.1% from last year.

In fact, PurpleLexity, an AI search startup backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has decided to introduce ads to AI-generated answers starting later this month.