OpenAI’s SearchGPT Takes Aim at Google’s Search Engine Dominance

Google is synonymous with internet search -- its market dominance has stood up against stout competition from Microsoft and others for years. It enjoys more than an 81% global search engine market share.

But OpenAI on Thursday announced the limited launch of SearchGPT, a GenAI-powered search engine that will use conversational artificial intelligence to give users quick and useful search results. The company said it is launching to a small group of users and publishers for feedback and has opened a waiting list.

Google’s search dominance has paid off -- its ad revenue from Google Search and other related services raked in $175 billion in 2023 alone, according to the company’s financial reports. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, generated $12.21 billion in ad revenue in 2023.

Google’s simple interface and targeted results are so ingrained in our daily internet use, it’s become more than a product -- it’s a verb. We don’t “search” the internet, when we need something, the first thought is to “google” it.

OpenAI’s SearchGPT will allow the user to ask follow-up questions, like in a conversation, to get more detailed information. SearchGPT’s prototype is “temporary,” the company says, adding that the features will likely be added directly into ChatGPT in the future.

Related:OpenAI’s Latest ChatGPT Enterprise Offering Targets Collaboration

ChatGPT has been the subject of several lawsuits, from creatives and from major publishers like The New York Times, over use of copyrighted material in the training of its large language models. The blog touts partnerships with The Atlantic and News Corp -- the SearchGPT results will connect users directly to publishers and users will know where the information is coming from, the company says.

“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,” Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, said in a statement.

Google’s stock price dipped 3% following the news of the release.

Ken Osowski, a search engine optimization consultant, posted on LinkedIn that OpenAI’s move could be a “game-changer if SearchGPT can present correlated search results at the outset,” but said the product would need “to get through early release bugs that ChatGPT encountered.”

Bugs aside, ChatGPT’s release proved to be a paradigm shifting event in the tech industry, starting an arms race for businesses to adopt GenAI for competitive advantage.

Amazon-backed Perplexity is another AI-powered search engine and its Pro-level product features access to GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Mistral Large, and Llama 3 language models. As of early 2024, the company claimed to have 10 million monthly users.

Related:OpenAI’s ChatGPT Launches ‘GPT-4o,’ Desktop App

Avi Hacker, founder and CEO of The AI Consulting Network, on LinkedIn wrote, “Is Perplexity about to meet its match? OpenAI just dropped a bombshell in the AI search world. Remember when Perplexity seemed like the only player in town for AI-powered search? Well, the landscape just got a lot more interesting … My take: This could be a game-changer for how we interact with information online.”