AI could transform internet search. Even Google is disrupting its own kingdom.

Some 99,000 times a second, people use a single company’s technology to search the internet. It’s so commonplace that computer users don’t say “search.” They will “Google” – or “Googlear” (Spanish) or “Googul” (Arabic) – a topic. 

Now, however, the dominance of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, is under attack. Legally and technologically, the company that has easily beat back challengers since its founding in 1998, faces perhaps its biggest threat yet. And the outcome may determine how people search for information online.

Alphabet’s immediate challenge is legal. This month, the Justice Department wrapped up its case with a closing argument that Alphabet illegally paid other companies to ensure its Google search engine would be the default option on the iPhone and other smartphones and web browsers. A second antitrust trial about Alphabet’s ad practices looms this fall. 

AI may spur rapid change in search

The longer-term threat is technological. For the better part of a year, analysts have suggested that artificial intelligence will erode Google’s search dominance. But that’s not a foregone conclusion for the hugely profitable $2.2 trillion company.

Still, the twin legal threats put Alphabet in an awkward position. At a time when increased government scrutiny might tempt Google to slow or curb aggressive moves, the rapid development of AI is forcing the company to move fast. To keep up with competitors, management may have to run, not walk, on the eggshells of legal risk.

“There’s an AI arms race,” says Chris Rodgers, founder and CEO of Colorado-based CSP, a company that helps businesses get noticed on the internet. “It is going to drive big changes in search.”

Already, Alphabet has begun rolling out changes. Some searches now include an AI-generated summary that tries to answer a user’s question directly before displaying the more traditional list of links. Far bigger changes are likely, analysts say, making search savvier, more streamlined, and visually and aurally helpful – like carrying around an instant expert on just about everything.

Hear an unfamiliar bird call? Apps already exist to identify birdsong. But in the new world of AI search, you simply ask your smartphone the species and it would automatically call up the app, make the identification, and tell you whether it’s rare for that place and season. Have a leaky faucet? You point the camera at the sink and ask what’s wrong, and the smartphone would deliver step-by-step instructions on how to fix it.

“Google shows you, like, 10 links – well, like 13 ads and then 10 links – and that’s one way to find information,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, on “Lex Fridman Podcast” last month. “Maybe there’s just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information.”

Are AI-generated search results reliable yet?

OpenAI poses one of the most potent challenges to Alphabet’s dominance. The company has been a step ahead of Google ever since it released its chatbot, ChatGPT, late in 2022. Alphabet’s Gemini chatbot went public a year later and faces a number of well-funded competitors from the likes of Amazon, Meta, and others.

The challenge for these companies is that none of their chatbots is accurate enough to provide consistently reliable answers the way a Google search does. Nor do they have anywhere near the search experience or training data that Alphabet has meticulously acquired over nearly three decades. Alphabet’s challenge is that by incorporating AI into search, it may cut into its traditional search business, which last quarter generated more than half the company’s sales.

Nevertheless, Alphabet is forging ahead by pushing Gemini into all its products. At its developer conference this week, it announced it was rolling out AI Overview, a feature that synthesizes even complex questions into a categorized page of simplified answers. In one demo, it displayed four top-rated Pilates studios within a half-hour walk of Boston’s Beacon Hill and a map of the route. In another, it suggested specific remedies from a user’s video of an old-fashioned record player that wasn’t working correctly. 

The technology wasn’t foolproof. Gemini suggested opening the back of a film camera (a no-no that ruins the film by exposing it) as one solution for the film being stuck. But many Wall Street analysts remain upbeat that Google can solve these problems and are raising their profit forecasts for the company, not lowering them. 

Google’s decline: possible but not inevitable

“Google has the upper hand” versus OpenAI, Gene Munster, managing partner with tech investment firm Deepwater Asset Management, said in a post on X last week. He pointed to the company’s 25 years of search data to train its AI models, global distribution, and huge infrastructure as big advantages over its competitors.

“So far, I don’t see signs that [the competitors] are really moving the needle,” says Tim Lee, author of the Understanding AI newsletter. 

Google’s legal jeopardy is more pressing. A loss in the current contracting case could mean the company could no longer pay Apple to make Google search the default option on the iPhone – the potential erosion of a huge base of users. A loss in the digital advertising technology case this fall could strike at the heart of that Google search revenue, which is ad-based. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

The last time a U.S. company faced such intense antitrust scrutiny – Microsoft in 1998 – the lawsuit distracted management and caused it to curb some of its aggressive behaviors. 

“Google is not out of the woods,” says Shane Greenstein, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “There’s a lot of speculation about where the future growth comes from.”

Editor's note: The name of Chris Rodgers' company has been corrected, and the article has been updated with two additional paragraphs about the use of AI for internet search results.