GOOGL Faces AI Competition

While Google remains in a position of strength in the eyes of Wall Street, the artificial intelligence era is complicating the story and providing some reasons for concern. Google faces increased competition from AI models and services, and is simultaneously dealing with a defection among certain users who want an AI-free search experience. In the past week, the company has lost two big-name AI researchers to its emerging rivals. More than three years into the generative artificial intelligence boom, Google has defied the many skeptics who thought ChatGPT would be the search giant's death knell.

But cracks are forming in its core business. Search engine DuckDuckGo is seeing install rates jump by up to 40% a week. Microsoft's Bing reached 1 billion users for the first time last quarter. And Google's search engine traffic is down slightly over the past month, while ChatGPT is up a tick.

Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock price has more than doubled in the past year and revenue growth in the first quarter was the fastest for any period since 2022. But the AI concern persists as more people turn to chatbots as their preferred method to track down information. ChatGPT consistently ranks as the top free app on Apple iOS, and Anthropic's Claude is currently eighth, one spot behind Google Gemini. Meanwhile, another wave of internet users is turning away from AI-powered search altogether in favor of non-AI alternatives.

com. "A lot of people use Google because Google is like the front page of the internet, but they want to go on these journeys and do the clicking and searching themselves and make their own decisions," said Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimization and AI search at marketing firm Amsive. Google is also reckoning with the challenge of fending off heavily funded AI upstarts that are paying top dollar for talent ahead of their prospective initial public offerings. Last week, Noam Shazeer, a vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini AI, announced he was leaving Google to join OpenAI.

And on Friday, John Jumper, DeepMind vice president and engineering fellow, said he was leaving for Anthropic. Alphabet's stock on Monday had its worst day in more than a year, dropping 5%. " A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story. For Google, the emergence of generative AI has represented an existential risk of sorts since the launch in late 2022 of ChatGPT, which recently surpassed 1 billion monthly active users.

The threat is both that Google loses its dominance and that, in trying to compete in AI, it cannibalizes search in favor of a new way of finding information that doesn't have a proven digital ad model. Ads still account for about three-quarters of the company's revenue. The sky-high margins from advertising allow Google to fund costly long-term bets like Waymo and space-based AI while also spending close to $200 billion on AI infrastructure. At its annual developer conference last month, Google said it would be redesigning the search box for the first time in 25 years, placing the "AI Mode" button directly in the box.

The search button is now below the box. "This is the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago," Elizabeth Reid, who oversees Google's search organization, said at the event. Additionally, Google's popular image generation tool Nano Banana is also available in the search box by clicking on the plus button. In the Google Search mobile app, a large "AI Mode" click box is nearly the same size as the regular search box.

Over the past month, Google's search engine traffic is down more than 1%. ChatGPT traffic is up a bit. DuckDuckGo, which has long positioned itself against Google as a more private search option, says install rates have been up as much as 75% from before Google's I/O announcement in May. Google has "to strike a balance, because if they go too far with AI, they're going to lose their users," said Amsive's Ray.

She called DuckDuckGo's market share "microscopic," but said there's been a big uptick of late. Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai recognizes the fears surrounding AI. On a recent episode of the "Hard Fork" podcast, Pichai said people are "rightfully" anxious about what sort of future the technology will create, calling the scale of change unprecedented. Google and OpenAI have both faced wrongful death lawsuits filed by family members of those who allegedly committed violence and self-harm due to their use of chatbots.

In March, Google was sued by a 36-year-old man's father, who alleged that the Gemini chatbot convinced his son to attempt a "a mass casualty attack" and to eventually commit suicide. In the search market, DuckDuckGo isn't the only engine responding to a desire for alternatives. Microsoft launched a Bing browser extension called "Bing AI Search Choice," giving users the option to turn off AI chat-like features. "AI is doing powerful things for search, but research tells us that not everyone wants to use AI for everything all the time," Jordi Ribas, president of search and AI at Microsoft, wrote in a LinkedIn post about the update.

There's also growing antipathy among publishers that have seen traffic from Google searches tank in part because AI is pulling information into summaries at the top of results, eliminating the need to click through. In an an