Google’s Search Monopoly Is Coming to an End? OpenAI’s Search GPT Is a Serious Threat to the Tech Giant

Google’s days of monopoly power may be coming to an end sooner than expected. The tech giant could face a huge threat from Sam Altman’s OpenAI as it awaits plans from Washington antitrust regulators to level the playing field in the internet search industry. A ruling issued Monday found that Google had built an illegal search monopoly, and regulators clearly see that as a major victory for themselves.

However, as Reuters reports, analysts say more and more people are using AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is eroding Google’s dominance.

Reuters quoted Arvind Jain, a former Google engineer who spent a decade working on products including search, as saying: “I think for Google right now, AI (is) a much bigger deal than the ruling. AI is also fundamentally changing how the search product works.”

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Is Google’s reign coming to an end?

Google controls about 90 percent of the global search market and brings in about $175 billion in annual revenue from the business. Even Apple, which prefers to build its own software and hardware, has allowed Google to be its default search engine. Apple pays Google a hefty fee for this. It looks like this preferential treatment in exchange for fees may be coming to an end. Apple has announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to its upcoming devices. It’s possible that Apple will also partner with OpenAI to bring SearchGPT to its devices instead of Google.

According to a report by Reuters, the ruling against Google could force Apple to end its search deal with the tech giant.

Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst at research firm Valoir, told Reuters: “The biggest threat to Google may be Google itself — trust is key to adopting any AI, and the initial Search Overviews bugs showed that Google engineers were more focused on getting things done quickly than getting them right, trying to keep up with the pace of OpenAI and others.”

Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, said ending Google’s dominance in search will be “very difficult,” Reuters reported. Luria added: “Nobody has made a huge dent in Google’s search dominance yet…we’ll see if this is the next domino that falls into place to actually give consumers more choices, real choices.”