#search-competition

#search-competition

OpenAI unveiled a web browser on Tuesday in a bid to make its ChatGPT AI product the starting point for online access and establish itself as central pillar of the internet economy. ChatGPT Atlas, as the new browser is called, looks and works much like a standard web browser but infuses generative AI capabilities throughout the experience, putting ChatGPT front and center for everything from internet search and shopping to email.

A court order will require Google to scale back some of its more aggressive tactics to get its search engine in front of as many users as possible, but it's still fighting to make sure new restrictions won't limit its AI expansion. At a hearing in a federal courthouse in DC on Wednesday, Google attorney John Schmidtlein told Judge Amit Mehta that he should not prevent the company from bundling its Gemini AI app with other Google apps like YouTube and Maps, Bloomberg reported.

The rise of ChatGPT and Perplexity is already starting to chip away at Google's search dominance. Through agentic AI and conversational search, these new browsers promise more personalization and a redefined search experience. Whether they'll truly pull users away from traditional search is still unclear - but brands can't wait to protect visibility. From what we know, both Perplexity's and OpenAI's browsers will focus on personalization, context-aware answers, and agentic AI to deliver more intuitive search experiences.

Judge Mehta wrote that while generative AI hasn't displaced Googling yet, AI startups could "end up being game changers." Tens of millions of people use GenAI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic's Claude, to gather information that they previously sought through internet search, Mehta wrote. Earlier in August, OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT is set to hit 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March. The app for Google's answer to ChatGPT, Gemini, had 450 million monthly active users,

In some cases, that's because the person doing the searching has added "reddit" to their query, deliberately pushing material from the internet's biggest, most indispensable hub of conversations to the top of Google results. But even if you haven't expressed an explicit preference for Reddit links, Google often emphasizes them. They can feel like islands of quality information floating in a river of links to sites that are spammy or just not very good.