Every second of every day, people across the world type tens of thousands of queries into Google, adding up to trillions of searches a year. Google and a few other search engines are the portal through which several billion people navigate the internet. Many of the world’s most powerful tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have recently spotted an opportunity to remake that gateway with generative AI, and they are racing to seize it. And as of this week, the generative-AI search wars are in full swing. The value of an AI-powered search bar is straightforward: Instead of having to open and read multiple links, wouldn’t it be better to type your query into a chatbot and receive an immediate, comprehensive answer? In order for this approach to work, though, AI models have to be able to scrape the web for relevant information. Nearly two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, and with users growing aware that many generative-AI products have effectively been built on stolen information, tech companies are trying to play nice with the media outlets that supply the content these machines need. This morning, the start-up Perplexity, which offers an AI-powered “answer engine,” announced revenue-sharing deals with Time, Fortune, and several other publishers. Moving forward, these publishers will be compensated when Perplexity earns ad revenue from AI-generated answers that cite partner content. The site does not currently run ads, but will begin doing so in the form of sponsored “related follow-up questions” this fall—a sportswear brand could pay for a follow-up question to appear in response to a query about Babe Ruth, and if the AI used Time in its answer, then Time would get a cut of the ad revenue for every citation. OpenAI has been building its own roster of media partners, including News Corp, Vox Media, and The Atlantic, and last week announced its own AI-search prototype, SearchGPT.
Full opinion : Big Tech and the Age of AI Search Engine Wars.
