The Google search engine has become such a ubiquitous part of life that it’s difficult to imagine the possibility that one day it could just vanish. Yet, that is what financial markets are doing – pondering an artificial intelligence-powered future of search in which Google is left behind.

Sure, the search engine’s parent Alphabet has a market capitalisation that, at $US2 trillion ($3.3 trillion), exceeds the entire Australian sharemarket. But the value of Google could and would be larger were it not for growing anxiety that AI is going to totally upend the way we find things on the internet, and how businesses pay platforms like Google for customers.