OpenAI’s launch of an AI search engine on Thursday was a big warning shot in its war to challenge Google's dominance and drive out AI search upstarts like Perplexity.
SearchGPT, as OpenAI's search engine is called, aims to provide “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources,” featuring real-time, up-to-date responses, OpenAI said. While currently just a prototype that's available to 10,000 users, it’s clear the battle over AI search is on.
So far, at least, the quest for AI search dominance has been like trench warfare—slow and difficult to advance. Take Microsoft, for example: On February 7, 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the “race starts today” in search, with a reimagined Bing search engine powered OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT.
Google, in response, quickly rolled out a competitor called Bard, later renamed Gemini, and then used Gemini's answers to supplement its traditional search links. But those so-called AI overviews ended up being so widely criticized for their "hallucinations," or incorrect or bizarre answers, (including suggesting “putting glue on pizza") that Google has reduced the frequency that they appear, from a high of 84% of queries down to less than 15% in June. And experts, including Abeba Birhane, senior advisor, AI accountability at Mozilla, have made clear that there may be no reliable way to get rid of AI "hallucinations" altogether.
Also scrambling for AI search market share are startups like Perplexity, which debuted in 2022 with a goal to unseat Google with what it claimed were highly-accurate results. But the company, which has raised $165 million in funding at an over $1 billion valuation, has hit serious turbulence. Last month, Forbes accused Perplexity of copyright infringement for scraping its online articles without permission to feed its AI, while magazine publisher Conde Nast followed with a cease and desist letter against Perplexity just a couple of days ago. Perplexity's CEO Arvind Srinivas responded to the Forbes accusation by saying the new product feature had "rough edges, and we are improving it with more feedback."
But, as has been widely reported, for months OpenAI has been trying to play nice with certain media companies by licensing their content for search results and to feed their content into ChatGPT, instead of scraping it without permission. The partners include The Atlantic, Vox Media and News Corp.
Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, is quoted in OpenAI’s blog post about SearchGPT's premiere on Thursday as praising the arrangement. “AI search is going to become one of the key ways that people navigate the internet, and it's crucial, in these early days, that the technology is built in a way that values, respects, and protects journalism and publishers,” he said.
In a sign of the high stakes in the search wars, Google’s stock tumbled Thursday afternoon within minutes of OpenAI making its much-expected foray into search. Google's shares ended the day down 3% at $169.16.
But does Google's blip mean the AI search wars are already won—or lost, depending on the perspective? Not at all.
As of June, after more than a year and a half of assaults on its core search business, Google still enjoyed a global market share of over 90%, as if there is no war. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Bing has a woeful 3.7% and Perplexity's is too low to be measured.
If OpenAI wants to gain ground, it will need to slowly claw its way through the trenches. And as for its buzzy ChatGPT assistant—its traffic is reportedly down from its April 2024 peak of 1.8 billion visits.
So OpenAI may score points for its new approach to search, focusing on publisher partnerships that offer more friendly and real-time sourcing of information for its search. But it remains to be seen whether it will win the AI search war, which is just starting to ramp up and will likely rage for years.
