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

Most people assume the web runs on Google. The reality is more concentrated: only three companies on earth operate truly independent search indices — Google, Bing, and Brave. Jean-Paul Schmetz helped build one of them. In this episode, Jean-Paul traces the arc from writing appointment software in a Belgian Radio Shack in 1981, through founding and selling Clix — a European search engine backed by Burda — to his current role as Chief of Ads at Brave, where he now sells search infrastructure to the AI companies that need it most. For CTOs, this is a rare look inside an infrastructure layer most take for granted: how search indices are actually built, why it takes decades and hundreds of millions to do it properly, and why the entire AI grounding market quietly runs on infrastructure a small group of engineers spent their careers building. Topics covered: - Why only Google, Bing, and Brave have truly independent global search indices - How AI companies use search grounding — and what happens when Google and Bing cut them off - The SERP API gray market and why it probably has a two-year shelf life - What it actually costs to crawl and index the web at scale - The advertising model that will eventually come to AI — and why it's inevitable - Jean-Paul's Stanford years: machine learning with Andrew Ng, and what was obvious in 2013 that took until 2022 to matter - Build vs. buy for search infrastructure in 2025

You can listen to #137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

#137 - Only Three Search Engines Left Standing: One of Them Powers Your AI with JP Schmetz // Chief of Ads @ Brave is an episode from alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders by Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast.

This episode is 93:17 long.

This episode was published on May 7, 2026.

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