Don’t panic, is Pichai’s message. He argues that even in the age of AI Overviews, people will still want to click through and go deeper for many types of searches. “The underlying principle is people are coming looking for information. They’re not looking for Google always to just answer,” he says. “Sometimes yes, but the vast majority of the times, you’re looking at it as a jumping-off point.”
Reid, meanwhile, argues that because AI Overviews allow people to ask more complicated questions and drill down further into what they want, they could even be helpful to some types of publishers and small businesses, especially those operating in the niches: “You essentially reach new audiences, because people can now express what they want more specifically, and so somebody who specializes doesn’t have to rank for the generic query.”
“I’m going to start with something risky,” Nick Turley tells me from the confines of a Zoom window. Turley is the head of product for ChatGPT, and he’s showing off OpenAI’s new web search tool a few weeks before it launches. “I should normally try this beforehand, but I’m just gonna search for you,” he says. “This is always a high-risk demo to do, because people tend to be particular about what is said about them on the internet.”
He types my name into a search field, and the prototype search engine spits back a few sentences, almost like a speaker bio. It correctly identifies me and my current role. It even highlights a particular story I wrote years ago that was probably my best known. In short, it’s the right answer. Phew?
A few weeks after our call, OpenAI incorporated search into ChatGPT, supplementing answers from its language model with information from across the web. If the model thinks a response would benefit from up-to-date information, it will automatically run a web search (OpenAI won’t say who its search partners are) and incorporate those responses into its answer, with links out if you want to learn more. You can also opt to manually force it to search the web if it does not do so on its own. OpenAI won’t reveal how many people are using its web search, but it says some 250 million people use ChatGPT weekly, all of whom are potentially exposed to it.
“There’s an incredible amount of content on the web. There are a lot of things happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its answers and to be a better super-assistant for you.”
Kevin Weil, chief product officer, OpenAI
According to Fishkin, these newer forms of AI-assisted search aren’t yet challenging Google’s search dominance. “It does not appear to be cannibalizing classic forms of web search,” he says.
OpenAI insists it’s not really trying to compete on search—although frankly this seems to me like a bit of expectation setting. Rather, it says, web search is mostly a means to get more current information than the data in its training models, which tend to have specific cutoff dates that are often months, or even a year or more, in the past. As a result, while ChatGPT may be great at explaining how a West Coast offense works, it has long been useless at telling you what the latest 49ers score is. No more.
“I come at it from the perspective of ‘How can we make ChatGPT able to answer every question that you have? How can we make it more useful to you on a daily basis?’ And that’s where search comes in for us,” Kevin Weil, the chief product officer with OpenAI, tells me. “There’s an incredible amount of content on the web. There are a lot of things happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use that to improve its answers and to be able to be a better super-assistant for you.”
