Google searching for an answer to the rising threat from AI chatbots

AI is coming for Google’s search engine dominance. In April, Google searches on Apple’s Safari browser declined for the first time. “That has never happened in 22 years,” said Apple’s senior vice-president of services, Eddy Cue, at a recent antitrust trial involving Google. The share price of its parent, Alphabet, tumbled by more than 7% after his comments.

- Patricia Clarke

If that is not a telling sign, here is another: “People are starting to say: ‘I ChatGPT-ed this, instead of: ‘I Googled this,” said Gil Luria, an analyst at US-based financial services company DA Davidson.

In many ways, this was inevitable. Google has a 90% market share and is very profitable in an open, competitive market.““There’s only one way to go from there,” said Luria in the week that Alphabet held its AGM and announced $500m in new antitrust compliance spending.

Google is facing threats on various fronts. Competition — including from AI companies such as OpenAI and Perplexity AI - is one. Arvind Jain, an ex-Google employee who now runs Glean, an AI search startup, said these players are transforming the future of search as we know it.