OpenAI’s long-rumored internet search tool is finally official.
The company said Thursday it’s alpha testing a prototype AI search tool, which will let users ask direct questions (including follow-ups) and get direct answers based on web sources.
OpenAI says it’s partnered with publishers including News Corp. and The Atlantic for some of the content that’ll be delivered through its AI search tool. But the terms of those agreements are unknown.
In the near term, OpenAI says it wants to test the search feature with a small set of users, and with publishers. The company says it eventually wants to add AI search to the main ChatGPT app.
Google built a $1.7 trillion empire built on a single idea–let users search the web and present a ranking of Ten Blue Links on a results page, interspersed with ads. But a new breed of AI-native search tools generates whole answers to user questions, often relieving the user of the need to link out to the original information sources. Because of that new kind of search, Gartner predicts that traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026. Now OpenAI, Google, Microsoft (Bing), and the upstart Perplexity are all offering AI search tools.
“ChatGPT is probably best positioned amongst all competitors to upset Google’s dominance in search, and aspects of the new interface, such as ‘visual answers,’ appear to be innovative and potentially disruptive,” says Damian Rollison of the search marketing platform SOCi in a statement. “However . . . the incredibly complex requirements of maintaining a world-class search platform tap into areas of expertise where OpenAI has yet to demonstrate its capabilities.”
Google stock dropped from $174.48 to $170.30 on the news.
“OpenAI is preparing to siphon Google’s billion-dollar advertising revenues by making it easy for users to stay within the OpenAI suite to get answers,” says Blitzscaling Ventures general partner Jeremiah Owyang. “Users no longer need to use antiquated search methods to trudge through websites to find the answers they want. Instead, OpenAI’s generative AI search will bring the answers right to the user.”
Google rolled out its AI search tool, called AI Overviews, to all users in the spring. But the company pulled back on the number of search types that would get an AI Overview after the tool began generating some wild and regrettable results.
News of SearchGPT may also be bad for Perplexity, which operates an AI-native “answer engine.” The company was founded well before either AI Overviews or SearchGPT were announced, and has built some impressive features. Perplexity, now valued at more than $1 billion, had hoped it could carve out a niche for itself before Google and OpenAI dove into AI-native search. (Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas declined to comment on the OpenAI announcement.)
Perplexity has been accused in the media of cribbing information from publishers without permissions, and for crawling the websites of publishers even after the websites posted a “do not scrape” code.
Publishers have naturally been very wary of AI search. AI search tools construct full answers using content from brand and publisher sites, often relieving users of the need to link out the original information sources.
OpenAI may have learned from Perplexity’s mistakes, says Jim Yu, CEO of the search engine optimization platform BrightEdge. Yu says this may be the reason OpenAI was careful to state that SearchGPT answers will include citations to original information sources and links to brand and publishers sites.
Still, BrightEdge research shows that Perplexity’s referrals to brands and publishers grew by 40% every month of the first quarter, and by 30% in April, May, and June.
The OpenAI announcement, and the reaction to it, seem to underline once again that our way of pulling information from the vast internet may be changing.
