Thing is, there are other search engines and some of them have growing and improving own search indexes. They might be worse than Google today but if Google goes totally bonkers, they will be a viable alternative. So people will have at least options. Some of those alternatives are also having a “kill switch for all AI”. Granted with search results it is hard to remove all the slop but there are mechanisms to weed them out and on top of that easy report functions against it.