Chatbots Are Putting Google and Apple Search Engines in Crisis

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“It hasn’t happened in twenty-two years.” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, said this in court, in the context of the ongoing antitrust proceedings against Google. The topic was precisely Google, or rather the number of searches made with the service through Safari, Apple’s browser, which in the past month had dropped. We all grew up knowing that if we wanted to find something online, we could use different services but one above all dominated the market: Google, hence the verb “to google.” For some years, however, we have also been recording increasingly close and concrete signs of a systematic change in the habits of some users, especially the youngest, accustomed to searching differently. In the beginning was TikTok: in March 2022, that is, eight months before the launch of ChatGpt, the New York Times reported that Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2012 approximately, had now become accustomed to using TikTok also to search for information online.

Listen to "The Sunset of Web Search" on Spreaker.

Then came ChatGpt, precisely, which opened the race to generative artificial intelligence, which are the main suspects for the sudden decline reported by Cue. So much so that analysts have long been waiting for a signal that is able to confirm what many have long suspected, and that is that the use of chatbots will affect the number of traditional online searches . Also for this reason, within a few minutes after Cue's statements, the stock market share of Alphabet, the group that includes Google, lost more than 7% on the stock market.

Of course, Google remains a fundamental service with about 90% of the market but more and more people are getting used to “ask ChatGpt” (or Perplexity, Claude, Meta AI, Mistral, Deepseek…) instead of doing a search on Google, Bing or Duckduckgo. Google itself has launched “AI Overview”, a service recently available in Italy, with which the company’s AIs offer the answer to users, before the usual results. In short, Google has found itself forced to play a game – that of generative AI – that risks undermining the foundations of its empire, and in which paradoxically it must suffer the competition of a non-profit (at least technically) like OpenAI.

It is no coincidence that in the weeks following the launch of ChatGpt, at the end of 2022, Google management declared a “red code”, a situation of total internal emergency, because the threat of chatbots was clear: to replace the old search engines. And not only that: also scrapping the idea of ​​surfing the web by trying a couple of results, and then opening different pages in the hope of finding what you were looking for. The more pages the user opened, obviously, the more advertising Google could offer them.

As Casey Newton wrote in the Platformer newsletter, the consequences of this are also being seen in the decline in CTR (Click-through rate, the percentage of users who click a link after visiting a page), which in some cases has dropped by 70-80%. The pages from which Google draws information for its automatic responses are being hit the hardest.

Apple is also not doing well, albeit for different reasons. Cue had been called to testify on the agreement that binds the company with Google: the latter in fact pays Apple about 20 billion dollars a year to keep its default search engine on Safar, the company's browser. A huge expense that has however allowed Google to consolidate its monopoly in the sector by securing Mac and iPhone users: and it is likely that the judge will order Google to stop these payments, depriving Apple of a significant annual check. In the meantime, Apple itself launched Apple Intelligence last year, a suite of AI products that has so far proven not to live up to expectations (indeed, non-existent, in some cases) .

Apple and Google are two giants grappling with an unforeseen revolution, and that, despite the many investments made over the years, they have not been able to lead. An underdog like OpenAI has done it, breaking a status quo on which they had perhaps relied a little. It is a new world, the post-ChatGpt one, for which neither company seems to be fully prepared.

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