OpenAI on Thursday announced its new ChatGPT search service. Available through the company’s ChatGPT website and via its Android and iOS apps, the search platform stands as the biggest potential threat to Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) search dominance in years.
Shares of Google parent Alphabet were off 1.5% following the news, roughly in line with the rest of the tech sector, which saw declines on concerns about the industry’s spending on AI infrastructure and uptake from customers.
OpenAI announced it was testing a temporary prototype search service in July, and this is the result of those tests. The Microsoft-backed (MSFT) company says in addition to pulling general information from the web, the search platform will also offer up content for weather, sports, stocks, news, and maps.
The search platform, the company says, runs on its GPT-4o model and also leverages information from third-party search providers and partners that have signed data-sharing agreements with OpenAI.
OpenAI says that its search service will cut down on the need to perform multiple searches for your queries by asking questions in a conversational way and then following up on those answers.
The company also says users will be able to use ChatGPT as the default search engine in Google’s Chrome browser by downloading and installing its Chrome extension.
For now, ChatGPT search is only available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users and folks who signed up for the SearchGPT waitlist. Enterprise and education users will be able to use the service in the coming weeks, while free users will get access in the coming months.
GPT search poses a potentially enormous threat to Google, which generates the vast majority of its revenue via its search advertising service. And the danger couldn’t come at a worse time. Google is already battling two antitrust suits related to its search and advertising dominance, and adding a new challenger to the list of troubles is sure to sting.
It doesn’t help that ChatGPT was one of the fastest-growing apps ever, and that it continues to remain popular among users. By adding generative AI-powered search to its arsenal, it’s becoming a much bigger thorn in Google’s side.
Of course, the tech giant still maintains an incredible 90% market share, according to data from StatCounter. The next closest competitor, Bing, has just 3.96% of the market. The company isn’t hurting financially, either. In its most recent quarter, advertising revenue came in at $65.8 billion, beating analysts’ expectations of $65.5 billion and increasing from $59.6 billion in the same quarter last year.
Google also isn’t sitting idly by on the AI front: The company already offers its own AI Overviews feature, which incorporates generative AI responses to users’ search queries in addition to the normal list of blue link results.
Microsoft has also tried to take on Google’s search business by adding OpenAI’s generative AI capabilities to its Bing search engine, but that hasn’t done much to pull at Google’s search lead.
Still, if OpenAI’s GPT search can outperform Google when it comes to consumers’ search results, it could start to put a dent in Google’s defenses.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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