The Signal #004 — Dakota’s read on the AI news that actually matters to people running a business.

Google’s CEO went on record last week saying people love the new AI Mode in Search. The same week, nearly 28% more people ran to a search engine specifically because it has no AI.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s a signal worth reading carefully.

What Happened

DuckDuckGo runs a dedicated AI-free search page at noai.duckduckgo.com. Between May 20 and May 25, visits to that page increased by 22.7% on average week-on-week, peaking at 27.7% on May 24. The DuckDuckGo mobile app saw US installs spike 18.1% on average compared to the prior week. iOS installs were even sharper, averaging 33% week-on-week growth and peaking at 69.9% on a single day. TechCrunch reported the growth held for six days, peaking at 30.5% on May 25.

All of this came directly after Google CEO Sundar Pichai said publicly, “People love [Search’s AI Mode].”

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg pushed back, telling journalist Paul Thurrott: “Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. As a result, their results are getting worse, not better.”

You can read the full breakdown at PC Gamer.

Why It Matters for Operators

If you run an HVAC company, a plumbing shop, a roofing crew, or a junk removal operation, your customers find you through search. That’s not a maybe. It’s the top of your funnel. So when search behavior shifts, even by a few percentage points, your lead volume can shift with it.

Here’s the part that matters most. The people fleeing to AI-free search are not a fringe group. They are regular people who typed something into Google, got an AI-generated summary (an overview the AI wrote by pulling from other sites, with no guarantee of accuracy), and decided they didn’t trust what they got. They wanted actual results. Actual websites. Actual businesses.

For a home services operator, that is good news wrapped in a warning. The good news: people still want to find real local businesses. They are not happy with AI telling them which plumber to call based on a summary the AI assembled from who-knows-where. The warning: if your business is hard to find outside of Google’s AI layer, you are one algorithm update away from invisible.

DuckDuckGo’s spike also tells you something about trust. When a tool is forced on you with no opt-out, some portion of your users will leave. That’s human nature. And the operators who understand that principle will build customer relationships that don’t depend entirely on any single platform doing them a favor.

What Most People Get Wrong

The common read on this story is “AI bad, people hate AI.” That’s too simple and it leads operators to the wrong conclusion.

The people leaving Google are not anti-AI. They are anti-bad-results. Google’s AI Mode is inserting a generated summary (text the AI wrote, not a direct link to a source) at the top of nearly every search. That summary often recycles content from the sites below it, which means the sites below it get fewer clicks, which means fewer businesses get found, which means the results slowly get worse over time because fewer businesses bother maintaining a strong web presence.

It’s a feedback loop, not a feature.

The operators who misread this moment will either panic and abandon any AI use at all, or ignore it completely and assume Google will sort itself out. Neither is right. The smarter move is to keep building your presence across more than one channel, make sure your business information is accurate everywhere it lives online, and treat AI tools as things that help you do work internally rather than things you rely on to be your storefront.

AI that helps your dispatcher, your estimator, or your follow-up process is doing something completely different than AI that rewrites your web presence into a summary a customer never clicks through.

The Lesson

A 28% spike in AI-free search visits is not the internet rejecting AI. It is customers rejecting a specific experience they didn’t ask for and couldn’t turn off. That distinction matters.

For operators, the takeaway is simple. Own your presence. Don’t let any single platform be the only place customers can verify you’re real, available, and worth calling. The channel that sends you leads today is one product decision away from sending you fewer.

Building on top of something you don’t control is fine until it isn’t. Build the parts you can control first.

If you want to think through what that looks like for a service business specifically, start at xovionlabs.com.