OpenAI has taken a bold step into the search engine market, traditionally dominated by Google, with the selective launch of SearchGPT. This artificial intelligence-powered search engine offers real-time access to information from the internet, marking a significant move for the AI giant. The announcement, made on Thursday, positions OpenAI in direct competition with not only Google but also its major backer, Microsoft’s Bing, and emerging services like Perplexity, a search-focused AI chatbot backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia.
The market reacted swiftly to the news, with shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet ending 3% lower on Thursday. OpenAI has initiated sign-ups for SearchGPT, which is currently in the prototype stage and being tested with a small group of users and publishers. The company plans to eventually integrate the best features of SearchGPT into ChatGPT.
“AI-powered search tools from OpenAI and Perplexity re-affirm search as a content engagement model but pressure Google to be better at its own game,” commented Kingsley Crane, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity.
Google, which dominates the search engine market with a 91.1% share as of June, according to web analytics firm Statcounter, faces a new kind of competition. SearchGPT promises to provide summarised search results with source links in response to user queries, allowing users to ask follow-up questions and receive contextual responses.
Additionally, OpenAI will offer publishers tools to manage how their content appears in SearchGPT results. News Corp and The Atlantic are among the publishing partners for this new tool. This collaboration follows content licensing agreements OpenAI has secured with major organisations like the Associated Press, News Corp, and Axel Springer.
Despite the innovation, new AI-powered search providers like Perplexity are encountering their own challenges, including pending legal action from publishers such as Wired, Forbes, and Condé Nast, as noted by Crane.
The integration of AI into search engines has been a growing trend since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Microsoft, leveraging its early investment in OpenAI, adopted OpenAI technology for its Bing search engine. In response, Google rolled out AI-powered summaries to the public at its developer conference in May, further intensifying the competition in the search engine market.
