Google Scholar, the largest scholarly search engine, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Over the years, it has become a vital tool in the scientific community. However, recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present challenges to its dominance. Competitors that enhance the search experience with AI tools and offer downloadable data are gaining traction. Researchers acknowledge Google Scholar's significant impact on science, providing free access, a vast range of information, and sophisticated search options. However, similar features are now offered by other platforms. AI-powered chatbots and tools, like ChatGPT, have become popular for literature searches and reviews. Some researchers are transitioning to these newer tools, although Google Scholar's entrenched position in academia makes it difficult to displace. Jevin West, a computational social scientist, suggests that Google Scholar's reign could be challenged due to emerging tools and innovations.

Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar's co-founder, welcomes efforts to improve access to scholarly information, recognizing the benefits for scientific advancement. Launched in 2004, Google Scholar revolutionized literature searches by crawling the web for scholarly work and forming alliances with publishers to access full texts. This capability promotes open access to research. However, concerns about the service's transparency exist, such as its opaque content indexing and restricted bulk downloads. Recent competitors, like the OpenAlex index, offer searchable scholarly data and downloadable records, addressing some of Google Scholar's limitations. Semantic Scholar, another tool, uses AI to summarize papers and identify key citations. AI-based systems such as Undermind provide superior search results by emulating human search strategies. While Google Scholar incorporates AI to improve search functionality and article recommendations, it does not yet provide AI-generated summaries for search queries, unlike standard Google searches. Acharya notes the difficulty in effectively summarizing scientific conclusions with context. Despite these challenges, Google Scholar's comprehensive access to full-text articles and its pivotal role in the academic world make it a cornerstone of scholarly information retrieval.