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Will generative AI kill web traffic? It may. AI-powered search tools like perplexity.ai can do 10 minutes of Google searches in about 10 seconds. It cites its sources, gives you a range of GenAI tools to use for output, and (most importantly) does not click on ads.
Google has done a few small things to enhance its search UI, and OpenAI has toyed with a “search with Bing” feature inside of ChatGPT. Nothing to see here… move along…
Now, there’s a pretty big rumor about OpenAI being set to launch search.openai.com on May 9. The new search engine is rumored to be partly powered by Bing, with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman expressing interest in combining large language models (LLMs) with search to find better ways to help people find, act on, and synthesize information, rather than just replicating Google Search. This move aligns with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s previous statement about integrating OpenAI’s GPT models into Bing to challenge Google. We’ll see. Right now, it’s all speculation.
As good as this sounds, given OpenAI’s lack of topical information retrieval expertise and the absence of an ecosystem to achieve the level of ubiquity and usefulness that Google enjoys, OpenAI has a long, hard road ahead.
Is there a way that generative AI could unseat Google? Of course there is. Is it likely to happen?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.