According to brokerage firm Evercore ISI, in a survey of 1,000 people, 5% said OpenAI's ChatGPT was their top search tool, up from 1% in June. Evercore said millennials (1981-1995) use it the most.

Google still dominates the search market, but its market share has declined. According to the survey results, 78% of respondents said their first choice was Google, down from 80% in June.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (left) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Photo: Insider

A few percentage points might not seem like much, but controlling how people access the world 's online information is a big deal.

This is what has driven Google's advertising business, contributing the majority of its revenue and profits. Microsoft Bing, on the other hand, only has 4% of the search market, according to Evercore, but generates billions of dollars in revenue annually.

The increase in ChatGPT, though small, is a sign that Google's position as the "gatekeeper" of the internet may be threatened by generative AI.

This new technology is changing how millions of people access information online, sparking a rare debate about Google's potential dominance.

OpenAI announced its search feature for ChatGPT in late October. This year, the startup also reached an agreement with Apple to bring ChatGPT to the latest iPhones.

When Evercore analysts delved into the "usefulness" of Google's AI tools, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot across 10 different scenarios, the results were quite interesting.

There are several situations where ChatGPT outperforms Google in terms of satisfaction by a relatively large margin: people learning specific skills or jobs, assisting with writing and programming, and finding ways to work more efficiently. It even leads in product search categories and online pricing.

Nevertheless, Google is still far ahead of ChatGPT, and the company itself has benefited from AI generation.

Earlier this year, Google released the Gemini chatbot and AI Overview, a feature that uses AI generation to summarize multiple search results. In an Evercore survey, 71% of Google users said these tools were more effective than their previous search experience.

In addition, among those using tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, 53% said they are searching more. This benefits both Google and OpenAI.

According to Evercore analyst Mark Mahaney, even a 1% search market share is worth approximately $2 billion per year. However, it would only be effective if it could monetize search queries like Google does. This is unlikely to happen in the short or medium term.

(According to Insider)