It does not follow that people making more searches means people are having more successful searches. If google found the exact thing you were looking for and put it top centre in the results, would the number of human searchers stay the same but the number of human searches drop?
Again, then why are people using Google more than ever?
I don't really see how "dead internet theory" explains that. If it were as bad as you claim, surely usage would be plummeting? But it's just the opposite.
Dead internet theory means real users are declining while bot users are skyrocketing.
For example google search is such a terrible experience these days that I’ll often ask an LLM instead.
That LLM may do multiple google and other searches on my behalf, combine, collate and present me with just the information I am looking for, bypassing the search experience entirely.
This is a fundamentally different use case from human traffic.
> Are you sure it’s _people_ driving this increase?
Most likely - yes. If Google has been dead for years people wouldn't pour hundreds of billions of dollars into ads there. The Search revenue keeps increasing, even since ChatGPT showed up. It might stagnate soon or even decrease a bit - but "death" ? The numbers don't back this up. One blog saying he stops paying for Google ads conflicts with the reality of around 200 billion yearly revenue from Search.
The policy described in my link is literally about making each user search more to get the results they want in order to drive more ad revenue. That would create more searches and a less good user experience.
From a user perspective, google search results are awful and almost always a complete waste of time.