Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave

Jean-Paul Schmetz, founder of Clix, Chief of Ads and Board Observer at Brave, and Chief Scientist at Burda, someone who has spent nearly 30 years building search infrastructure from the ground up, joins Tobias to explore the hidden layer powering the modern AI stack.

They unpack why only three companies on earth operate a truly independent search index, how the entire AI grounding market quietly depends on infrastructure built by a handful of engineers, and what it actually takes to crawl and rank the web at scale.

They also dig into Google's origin story and the strategy behind their dominance, the SERP API gray market and its uncertain future, why building a search engine is still a decade-long problem, and what the next two years of consolidation in AI and search might look like.