In the wake of Google’s recent antitrust loss, it’s clear that Yelp smells blood in the water. Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO, recently penned a blog post announcing that Yelp is suing Google, accusing it of being a monopoly that unfairly suppresses local search results.

Stoppelman makes a compelling case, arguing that Google has been propping up what Yelp calls an inferior local search product to capture more search traffic within its own ecosystem—something widely known as “zero-click search.”

As I’ve pointed out in my newsletter, this couldn’t come at a worse time for Google. For the first time, competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity AI see a path to challenge Google’s dominance in search. But AI-driven search is a different beast, something I’ve referred to as “answer engines.” Unlike traditional search, these tools don’t provide a list of links or drive traffic to the sources they pull from; instead, they deliver direct answers, posing a new kind of threat to Google’s search empire.