OpenAI made a significant move in its challenge against Google's dominance with the launch of an AI search engine called SearchGPT. The aim of SearchGPT is to deliver fast and relevant answers from reliable sources in real-time. Although it is currently a prototype available to 10, 000 users, it is evident that the battle for AI search supremacy is underway. Thus far, the quest for AI search dominance has resembled trench warfare - slow and challenging to progress. Microsoft, for instance, announced on February 7, 2023, that the race for search had begun, featuring a revamped Bing search engine powered by OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT. Google responded by swiftly introducing a competitor named Bard, later renamed Gemini, incorporating Gemini's responses to complement its traditional search results. However, these AI overviews faced widespread criticism for producing incorrect and bizarre answers (like the suggestion of "putting glue on pizza"), leading Google to reduce their appearance from 84% of queries to less than 15% in June. Experts, including Abeba Birhane from Mozilla, have voiced doubts about completely eliminating such AI "hallucinations. " Startups like Perplexity are also vying for a share of the AI search market. Perplexity, which launched in 2022 with the claim of offering highly accurate results, has encountered significant obstacles. Forbes accused Perplexity of copyright infringement for scraping online articles without permission to train its AI.

Subsequently, Conde Nast issued a cease and desist letter to Perplexity. Arvind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, responded to Forbes's allegation by acknowledging room for improvement in the new product feature. Unlike Perplexity, OpenAI has sought to establish partnerships with media companies, licensing their content for search results and integration into ChatGPT instead of unauthorized scraping. Partnerships include The Atlantic, Vox Media, and News Corp. Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, commended this approach, emphasizing the importance of building AI search technology that respects and safeguards journalism and publishers. Following OpenAI's much-anticipated entry into search, Google's stock experienced a decline of 3% within minutes, underscoring the high stakes in this search war. However, this blip does not necessarily indicate victory or defeat in the AI search wars. As of June, despite facing over a year and a half of challenges to its core search business, Google's global market share remained over 90%. Microsoft's Bing accounted for a mere 3. 7% share, while Perplexity's share was too low to be measured. OpenAI must make gradual progress through the trenches if it intends to gain ground. Furthermore, its popular ChatGPT assistant has reportedly experienced reduced traffic since its peak of 1. 8 billion visits in April 2024. Although OpenAI's focus on publisher partnerships for search, offering a friendlier and real-time information sourcing approach, may earn some points, the outcome of the AI search war is yet to be determined. This war has only just begun and is expected to persist for years.