M.G. Siegler • #chrome • Apr 30, 2025

Chrome Is Worth $100B+ to Google

And so you'd have to imagine that's what they'd be seeking in a forced sale (which isn't going to happen, but humor me)...

A lot of good/interesting points from John Gruber in this piece on the Google Chrome sell-off situation (and I swear I'm not just saying that because he riffs on my own earlier piece on the matter). In terms of valuing Chrome:

3 billion users = $15–$20 billion is not real math. It’s just bullshit. The users are only valuable right now because they perform a lot of Google web searches within Chrome. Chrome users also make money for Google by using other Google properties that show ads, like Maps and Gmail. And Chrome encourages users, in general, to use Google properties and services like Docs. If you try to work out how valuable Chrome is to Google, it’s seemingly worth a veritable fortune. But that doesn’t mean Chrome holds any value of its own, on its own.

It's absolutely true that Chrome is worth far more to Google than it would be to any other company for the reasons he states. But it wouldn't be worthless to those other companies, it would just be an entirely different value proposition. If you bought Chrome and immediately took control over the updating of it – i.e. users didn't have to download a new version from you – that would be insanely valuable because you'd have control over an app with some 3B+ users. If nothing else, it would be the best distribution deal in the world. Imagine OpenAI taking control and immediately defaulting those billions of users to ChatGPT in the Omnibox...

That's not to say they would or should do that – certainly some large percentage of the Chrome user base would revolt. Most users naturally hate change already, and that would definitely be a tricky switch-a-roo. Instead, what they'd probably do is put in prompts to move you over to ChatGPT. And eventually, they might bake it into other parts of Chrome, less obvious than the Omnibox. But that box remains the most valuable aspect of Chrome, so eventually, it would be the place you want your product/service, obviously. The same situation would be true for Yahoo or Perplexity or anyone else buying Chrome.

So what's the price they'd be willing to pay for that? Hard to know, but certainly Google would push the highest price possible in the event of a forced sale. And given the 3B+ users, I'd bet they'd start by asking above $100B...

A key point to remember is that Google doesn’t pay Apple or Mozilla to make Google the default search engine in Safari and Firefox. They pay Apple and Mozilla per search that goes to Google from those browsers. It may or may not be in their contracts that Apple and Mozilla will make Google the default search engine in their browsers, but even if it is, that’s not what Google is paying for. They pay per search. It seems widely understood that one of the remedies that will come out of the U.S. v. Google verdict is that Google will be banned from any agreements that make Google search the default in other browsers. But I think it’s pretty clear how that will play out.

I could be wrong, but I do think the default element is in those contracts. They have to start with something out of the box and that something is Google. But yes, the valuable aspect of the agreement are the actual searches. And a judge obviously can't make users of Safari (or Firefox) stop using Google. The bigger question is if they could stop the traffic acquisition payments. I've been saying from the get-go that I don't think they can do that because not only would it not likely change Google's position in the market, but it would be hugely advantageous to Google. They'd still get most of the searches they do now on Apple devices, but would have to pay $0 for them, instead of $20B+ a year for them. Worse, they would be court-ordered to pay $0. They wouldn't be penalizing Google, they'd be penalizing Apple – and that could very well kill Mozilla.

And that points to perhaps the biggest value of Chrome, which only Google can get:

With Chrome, Google gets to show users ads without paying any sort of traffic acquisition fee to the browser maker, because they’re the browser maker. Chrome is extremely profitable for Google not because it makes any money on its own, but because every Google search that starts in Chrome is a search Google doesn’t have to pay a TAC fee for.

Assuming Google still had to (was allowed to?) pay traffic acquisition costs to third-party browsers per above, those numbers would go through the roof for Google without Chrome. Right now, Google gets away without paying those on 60%+ of browsers because those browsers are Chrome! Gruber breaks down the numbers a bit in a footnote on his post:

Given that Safari generates over $20 billion in revenue for Apple annually, almost all of it in TAC fees from Google, and that surely almost all of that revenue is profit, and that Chrome has more than 3× Safari’s global web browser market share (across all devices, desktop and mobile), surely Chrome saves Google at least, say, $20-30 billion in TAC fees that Google would be paying to another company if some other company owned Chrome. If Apple generates $20 billion in profit from TAC fees for Safari, surely Chrome would generate at least as much, if not more, for a hypothetical buyer of Chrome who somehow managed to keep Chrome, under its ownership, as popular as Chrome is under Google’s. But so that would mean Chrome, as a purchasable asset, would surely be worth far, far more than $20 billion. If you valued Chrome at 10× revenue, that would mean it’s worth like $200-300 billion. But of course it’s not worth that much as a standalone entity, because it would never work out that a new owner could keep Chrome as popular as it is today, as an integrated Google product.

Again, Google would surely be seeking $100B+ for Chrome if they were forced to sell it. If nothing else, that's approaching what their TAC fees would be a year under the current model (in a world where Chrome is owned by someone else).

One more thing: there remain so many other unclear second order effects of Google having to sell off Chrome, such as what happens to Chromium? And related, would Google be barred from building another browser with that code, just as Microsoft and others do now? Could they just do that and call it 'Chrome 2'?