According to brokerage Evercore ISI, in a survey of 1,000 people, 5% said OpenAI’s ChatGPT was their top search engine, up from 1% in June. Evercore said millennials (aged 1981 – 1995) used the app the most.

Google still dominates the search market, but its share has fallen. According to the survey, 78% of respondents said Google was their first choice, 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 may not seem like much, but controlling how people access the world 's information online is a big deal.

This is what drives Google's advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue and profits. Microsoft Bing has just 4% of the search market, according to Evercore, but generates billions of dollars in revenue each year.

ChatGPT's increase, while small, is a sign that Google's position as the internet's "gatekeeper" may be under threat from generative AI.

The new technology is changing the way millions of people access information online, sparking a rare debate about Google's dominance.

OpenAI announced a search feature for ChatGPT in late October. This year, the startup also reached a deal with Apple to bring ChatGPT to new iPhones.

When Evercore analysts dug into the “usefulness” of Google’s AI tools, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot across 10 different scenarios, the results were quite interesting.

There are a number of situations where ChatGPT beats Google in satisfaction by a wide margin: people learning specific skills or tasks, helping with writing and programming, looking for ways to be more productive. It even comes out ahead in categories like product searches and online pricing.

Still, Google is way ahead of ChatGPT, and the company itself benefits from generative AI.

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

Additionally, 53% of people who use tools like ChatGPT and Gemini say they're searching more, which helps Google as well as OpenAI.

Even a 1% share of the search market would be worth about $2 billion a year, according to Evercore analyst Mark Mahaney. But that would only work if search queries could be monetized like Google, which is unlikely in the short or medium term.

(According to Insider)