I think this actually misses the point. There are two factors to consider, the first is the creation and maintenance of the search heap, which requires lots of robots and time - do not see chat doing that directly. The second is the user client and it’s ability to return a better curated set of results.
I suggest it is the second Google are worried about, as it effectively means they lose their direct user.interaction and opportunity for advertising.
This would seem to be similar to where MS were a decade or so back with Windows, where the OS was rapidly becoming ‘infrastructure’ - hence MS started doing “attention seeking” changes to Windows…
Biting the hand that feeds IT
