OpenAI says ChatGPT is catching up to Google in search

At a press event, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, Adam Fry, said search queries run through ChatGPT now equal 20 percent of Google's volume. OpenAI counts a search as a query that triggers a web search, not a definition or simple how-to. Fry didn't say where the Google comparison number came from.

For scale, The Verge notes Microsoft's CEO testified in 2023 that Bing held about 3 percent of the market after more than a decade. If OpenAI's number holds up, a chatbot has done in a few years what a dedicated search engine couldn't.

We'd treat the headline figure with care. It's a company-reported comparison, the Google denominator is unsourced, and OpenAI chose its own definition of a search. That doesn't make it wrong. It means it's a claim, not a measurement, and we'd like to see it checked.

The direction, though, is hard to argue with. People are asking chatbots questions they used to type into a search box, and answers that arrive pre-assembled are genuinely useful for a lot of tasks. We're not nostalgic about ten blue links.

What we're watching is the business model coming along for the ride. Fry said ads haven't hurt usage and that most people don't seem to mind them, and that ads may show OpenAI could be doing more. OpenAI also recently started showing images of sponsored products inside ChatGPT. That's the same road Google walked, only now the ad sits inside a conversational answer that feels like advice. The line between recommendation and placement gets much harder to see.

There's also the open web to think about. Google has been sending less traffic to outside sites as it leans into AI answers, and chat-based search tends to summarize rather than send people elsewhere. If both of the biggest front doors to information keep answers in-house and sell placement inside them, the publishers and creators who supply the underlying knowledge get squeezed from both sides.

Competition in search is healthy and overdue. But if the result is two ad-funded answer engines instead of one, users should want clear labeling and some way to see where an answer came from.

OpenAI likely relies heavily on Microsoft Bing plus its own index for web results, according to The Verge. The company is reported to be approaching a possible IPO, and ads are one of its more visible paths to revenue. OpenAI also described a push it calls "Intelligent UI," building visual, interactive elements into chatbot responses.