The Rise of AI-Powered Search: SearchGPT vs Google

SearchGPT Is Coming Soon; Five Ways It Will Be Different Than Google

I'm still on the waitlist myself. (If you're not on it too, you can join here.) But using sample queries provided by OpenAI, plus the Browse with Bing search functionality that came with OpenAI's latest flagship model, GPT-4o, I've been able to draw some early conclusions about what it's like. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. As I've learned more about SearchGPT, the key question I'm exploring is this: How will be it any different from Google -- which owns 90% of internet search activity --and why would anyone prefer to search the web using ChatGPT instead? In a March interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company is focused on the same question. "Maybe there's just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information," he said. OpenAI plans to integrate these features directly into its ChatGPT chatbot someday. Until then, based on my early research, here are five ways SearchGPT stands apart from Google. One of the main differences between search with OpenAI and Google is the results page. When you make a query with SearchGPT, you get an answer summary with links to information sources. The idea is to save time with more direct responses. A sample SearchGPT query asks for the best tomatoes to grow in Minnesota. The results call out Early Girl, Celebrity, Roma and Cherokee Purple, along with links to the gardening resources that make those recommendations. When you make that same query with Google, you get an AI Overview, or an AI-generated summary of results, which is a pretty good parallel to what SearchGPT is doing overall. But you also get the People Also Ask feature with four suggested questions and then some links. If the AI Overview answers your question, you're in luck. If not, you'll have to do some scrolling. It's that scrolling that OpenAI hopes to eliminate. "I feel like a lot of people are kind of sick of going to multiple websites in the hopes that they actually find something," said Danny Goodwin, editorial director of SEO news site Search Engine Land. "It may be more contained within the SEO industry itself, but there's been a lot of complaints about the quality of Google search ... it's very hard to find answers to what should be simple questions." Another big distinction: SearchGPT won't likely have ads. At least for now. After all, SearchGPT will be available to ChatGPT Plus members, who pay $20 a month for unlimited access to the GPT-4o model. In the Fridman interview, Altman made it clear he does not like ads. "I like that people pay for ChatGPT and know that the answers they're getting are not influenced by advertisers," he said. "When I go use Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other great but ad-supported product, I don't love that and I think it gets worse, not better, in a world with AI." Google loves ads. It has offered advertising since 2000 -- and made $237.8 billion from ads in 2023 alone. OpenAI said it plans to eventually integrate search directly into its ChatGPT chatbot. The result will be a more conversational experience in which SearchGPT retains context to answer follow-up questions. "Instead of typing a bunch of keywords or phrases into a search box, you'll ask SearchGPT questions in the same way you'd ask a friend or a known expert to provide answers or overviews in the form of an ongoing dialogue," said Mike Grehan, CEO of digital marketing agency Chelsea Digital. One of OpenAI's sample searches is, "When can I see nudibranchs in Half Moon Bay this weekend?" SearchGPT delivers images of nudibranchs, also known as sea slugs, as well as the exact time for low tide each day. It cites the Pacific Beach Coalition and Tide Forecast as sources. And then the mock user asks, "Will it be hot?" and SearchGPT knows this query is looking for a weather forecast for Half Moon Bay, California. If I ask Google, "What is there to do in New York next weekend?" and then, "Will it rain?" I get weather results for my current location. Both Google and SearchGPT have had hallucinations, which occur when a chatbot delivers false or misleading information. You may recall Google's AI Overviews got off to a rocky start, no pun intended. But after scaling back and regrouping, we now see AI Overviews on about 8% of Google searches. SearchGPT has had its own hiccups, even in promotional materials. In a video in the OpenAI blog post, there's a search for "music festivals in boone north carolina in august." However, as The Atlantic pointed out, it delivered the wrong dates for the Appalachian Summer Festival. ChatGPT comes with the caveat, "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info." It wasn't immediately clear if SearchGPT provides a similar warning. Not all searches are informational. Sometimes we're looking for things to buy or places to go. This is where Google still has an advantage. Google Shopping launched in 2002 as Froogle. (Yes, really.) And the search giant released its first product focused on local businesses in 2005. It's well-established in both. In the blog post, OpenAI said it will continue to improve in both of those areas. When I used ChatGPT to search for "pizza near me," the chatbot said it needed a city or zip code. When I added my zip code, it came up with three real pizza places in my town. I don't particularly like one of them, but they all exist. "Perhaps it's better to think of SearchGPT as a concierge-style service and Google as an ever-growing encyclopedia-meets-atlas-meets-news-bureau," Grehan said.

The GenAI era of search. Who will take the lead?

Since Google announced its beta testing of SGE (now AI Overviews) during Google I/O 2023, the internet has been abuzz with talk of a new GenAI era of search. But this "new" era began in November 2022, when users started asking questions to ChatGPT. The release of OpenAI's chatbot marked the transition from search engines to answer engines, something we are experiencing today. Yet, this transition could have been much smoother. At Google's recent I/O, the Google team made a grand announcement about the public launch of AI Overviews, mentioning the AI word 124 times. Despite the search giant's flashy presentation, the rollout of AI Overviews has been rather conservative, available only to logged-in users in the US. In SE Ranking's latest research on AI Overviews, we observed a significant drop in the presence of AI Overviews in search results after Google held I/O. Now, only 8.71% of keywords feature AI Overviews, a substantial decrease from our pre-rollout findings, where 64% of keywords had AI Overviews. Google's cautious approach might be due to the criticism AI Overviews have faced from the media and users. It could also be because AI Overviews require more computational resources than traditional search results, and the monetization of AI answers is still in development. This is why the official launch of AI Overviews seems more like a large public beta test for Google to gather more data and train its LLM. It also seems like Google has internal mechanisms and criteria for evaluating the quality of AI Overviews-generated answers. Post-launch, these criteria appear to have become stricter. Google allows Gemini to generate answers in niches where it is more confident in the responses. According to SE Ranking's latest research about AI Overviews, the Relationships niche leads, triggering AI Overviews 26.62% of the time, followed by Food and Beverage (24.78%) and Technology (18.11%). In contrast, niches more closely related to user well-being, such as Healthcare (0.44%), Legal (0.34%), and News and Politics (0.24%), trigger AI Overviews less than 1% of the time. This is presumably because AI's hallucinations and biases have greater potential to cause harm in these niches. Harmful answers can still appear in niches where Google frequently triggers AI Overviews. For instance, there was a recent incident where an AI Overviews suggested adding glue to pizza sauce, citing a joke post on Reddit. While integrations with platforms like Reddit, Quora, Stack Overflow, and Wikipedia offer vast amounts of human-generated data, the moderation of such content was not designed to train LLM models. Reddit, in particular, is full of jokes and inappropriate memes. Interestingly, OpenAI has also struck a deal with Reddit, but ChatGPT does not produce potentially harmful answers as often as AI Overviews do. This discrepancy suggests that Gemini may rely more on citing Reddit directly rather than analyzing the content. On the other hand, OpenAI's focus on creating an LLM with better "critical thinking" capabilities has allowed it to surpass Google in the AI race. Google had DeepMind at one point, but few people care or even remember. Google's major advantage, however, is the enormous volume of data it can use to train its models. Beyond the billions of daily Google searches, the company can access data from 3 billion Android users. This exclusive integration into a vast system like Android is something no other LLM model can achieve. Yes, OpenAI has also integrated its LLM into Apple's OSes, but the deal is not exclusive, as Apple follows a no-vendor-lock policy. Apple has also created its own LLM and plans to integrate other models, like Claude. However, considering OpenAI's partnerships with Reddit, Apple, and Microsoft, they may have the ambition and resources to surpass Google. Will OpenAI launch its own answer engine? It's entirely possible. OpenAI is more agile and youthful compared to the massive and cumbersome Google. The company also tends to make bold or rather emotionally driven decisions -- like the departure and return of Sam Altman and the recent controversy involving Scarlett Johansson's voice during the launch of ChatGPT-4o, among others. Nevertheless, OpenAI is staying noticeably cautious. It seems to be weighing the pros and cons of launching an answer engine that would directly compete with Google. This deliberation stems from concerns about AI hallucinations and biases, which could lead to the spreading of misinformation if not carefully managed. Alternatively, OpenAI may leave the launch of answer engines to other players who plan to use OpenAI's LLM. Google's advantage regarding the volume of data available for training LLMs is that it can only be surpassed by Google itself. According to SE Ranking's latest research on AI Overviews, scrolling to organic results is becoming increasingly difficult. Featured snippets appear next to AI Overviews 45.39% of the time. When featured snippets and AI Overviews appear together, their sources match 61.79% of the time, meaning users see the same information multiple times. Additionally, ads now accompany AI Overviews 87% of the time, up from 73% before the rollout during Google I/O 2024. The co-occurrence of AI Overviews, featured snippets, and ad blocks may be a step towards training the model to compile an AI Organized Search Results Page. Currently, users might have to skip the first page and go to the second to find organic results that better answer their questions. Hallucinations in AI Overviews' answers, duplication of information across different snippets, and the distant placement of genuinely helpful answers could alienate users. This might reduce their loyalty and trust in Google and push them to adopt new search methods, including ChatGPT. Moreover, OpenAI already provides users with more than just search answers. Gemini has only now begun to integrate into G-Suite, and the success of this integration remains uncertain. In the alternative and worst-case scenario, some users might blindly trust AI Overviews' answers without fact-checking. Google and other LLM models must take this responsibility seriously. If users prioritize quick and accurate answers, the shift to AI Overviews and an AI Organized Search Results Page could hurt the SEO industry, small and medium-sized businesses, news outlets, and blogs made by independent creators. Once AI satisfies users' queries, the need to scroll to organic results and dig deeper will disappear. This change in user behavior will make it difficult to drive traffic, and reaching the target audience outside of advertising will become nearly impossible. Consequently, more businesses, media outlets, and creators will likely migrate to social media, email newsletters, or niche platforms, while some may go bankrupt and struggle to recover. It is unclear whether Google will seek a balance between transitioning to an answer engine and supporting business users (this includes media and independent creators). Perhaps the SERPs as we know them will become a feature like "Google Classic"? If not, we could be heading towards an even more fragmented and dull Internet. Both Google and OpenAI have significant advantages. Google's user base and exclusive integrations are unmatched, while OpenAI's years of focused development and influential partnerships position it as a strong competitor. The winner of this race will likely be determined by who can best balance technological innovation with user needs and ethical considerations. Overcoming hallucinations, addressing user adoption and trust challenges, and supporting businesses and media will be crucial to leading the search revolution. Fact-checking remains the primary challenge for all AI models. ChatGPT often declines to answer certain questions, stating it's "just an AI model," while Google reduces the number of AI Overviews triggered answers. Despite its flops this year, Google could still win the GenAI search race. Integrating Gemini into Android will help 3 billion people use AI in their daily lives. For example, Android users will be able to use AI to identify whether a tomato is still good to eat simply by opening the camera and speaking. If nearly half the planet uses Gemini, it will become the most trained AI model in the world. However, to do this at this scale, Google must find a way to obtain these resources without consuming electricity at the rate of a large European country. Nevertheless, remember that OpenAI can be unpredictable, and this is a rapidly changing field. Current and new advancements that we may not yet be aware of could shift the landscape entirely. We've featured the best AI writer.