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

SHOW NOTES

Jean-Paul Schmetz has been close to search infrastructure for nearly three decades — as founder of Clix, the European search engine that eventually became part of Brave, and now as Chief of Ads at Brave Software. In this conversation with Tobi, he opens up the hood on one of the internet's most misunderstood infrastructure layers.

Key topics covered:

• The three independent search indices: why only Google, Bing, and Brave could answer every query on earth if the others disappeared
• How AI grounding works — and how most AI products are either paying for Brave Search API or quietly scraping Google
• The SERP API ecosystem: legal exposure, unit economics, and why Jean-Paul gives it a two-year shelf life
• Google's origin story: the NDA, the 120% revenue share strategy, and why they spent years pretending to lose money
• What it takes to build a search index from scratch — and why it's still a 10-year problem
• The Inktomi story: the $1M autocomplete investment no one else was willing to make
• Why Brave is profitable selling shovels to the AI gold rush — and what that looks like at $10M/month in infrastructure
• Agents and the web: why most people won't know what to do with 50 agents, just like they didn't know what to do with 50 employees
• What Jean-Paul would tell his 1996 self: think simpler, invest more aggressively, and stop underestimating capital

TIMESTAMPS: [to be added]

QUOTES:

[17:49] "Google was not better. It was just simply that they were driving you to queries they could answer better." — Jean-Paul Schmetz

[37:44] "There are more countries in the world that build atom bombs than countries that have a search engine." — Jean-Paul Schmetz

[49:08] "You're driving these Formula 1s with the wheels not properly attached." — Jean-Paul Schmetz

[01:28:45] "It's easy to appear intelligent when you list all the things that can go right, but it's much more courageous to actually claim what can go wrong." — Jean-Paul Schmetz