[AINews] Google admits AI Mode hurts Search revenue; -15% $500B drop worst since 2004 IPO. AI Bear Market coming?

As an engineer-focused newsletter we only very rarely let financial stories through (our last example was Jan 2025), but when this is about the future of Google and Google Search, with a recently departed AI leadership, you cannot not care. At its heart is the tension between overview pages and underlying pages they summarize. Any good enough summary obviates the need for you reading the source. Google’s Featured Snippets or Knowledge Panels have long had that tension with the publishers that supply that data. But now, Google’s own AI Overviews are potentially affecting traffic with… Google's Search revenue. “It’s worth noting that the strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact because of the lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode.” This is against a backdrop of souring tech/AI sentiment in public markets - and with OpenAI raising at $1.25T not $1.4T, not the sort of thing you want in the lead up to one of the biggest tech IPOs of all time. Plan rename: Anthropic renamed its Max tiers. Max 5x is now "Max" at $100/month, and Max 20x is now "Ultra" at $200/month. Existing subscribers do not need to take any action (announcement). Plan rename: Anthropic…