Google searches fell in Safari for the first time ever last month, Apple’s senior vice-president of services Eddy Cue said during his testimony in the US justice department’s lawsuit against Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Apple is “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices to focus on AI-powered search.
Cue said that he believes AI search providers have the potential to replace traditional search engines like Google in the long run. However, he noted that these services probably won’t be the default, as there is room for improvement.
The growth of web search using AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot are making users less willing to visit Google as the primary method of finding information.
Google pays Apple around $20 billion a year to make its search engine the default in Safari. Stopping Google from paying companies to be the default search engine is among the remedies that the US justice department has proposed to break up its dominance in online search.
“Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices,” Cue said during his testimony. “I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”
The gradual leaning towards AI is important for the iPhone and a company with over two billion active devices. Since Apple’s iPhone launched in 2007, users have browsed the web by making searches through Google. Now, consumers are in a universe dominated by AI from companies that are new.
At present, Apple offers OpenAI’s ChatGPT as an option in the Siri digital assistant and the company is expected to add Gemini — Google’s AI search product — later in the year, according to Bloomberg. Cue said the agreement with OpenAI allows it to add other AI providers to the company’s operating system, including Apple’s own.
With more companies embracing AI, traffic to websites that would normally receive clicks from search results is dipping, dealing a blow to some businesses.
Cue said AI players need to enhance their search indexes and even if that doesn’t happen quickly, these companies have other features that are “so much better that people will switch”.
“There’s enough money now, enough large players, that I don’t see how it doesn’t happen,” Cue said, referring to a shift from standard search to AI.
Large language models, which form the foundation of generative AI, continue to improve, giving users more reason to change their habits. “The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts.
Technology shifts create these opportunities. AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants,” pointed out Cue.
AI search tools come with deep research and agentic features, allowing them to respond to a natural language query. But there is a chance they may hallucinate incorrect answers in areas with blind spots.
In 2022, after ChatGPT’s glitzy launch, Google invested more than ever before to fund its AI efforts and leverage its vast data trove. Google recently expanded AI Overviews — summaries that appear atop the traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages on a search query — for users in more than 100 countries.
