OpenAI says its new AI search tool will play fair with publishers

OpenAI’s long-rumored internet search tool is finally official.

The company said Thursday it’s alpha testing a prototype AI search tool, which will let users ask direct questions (including follow ups) and get direct answers based on web sources.

OpenAI says it’s partnered with publishers including News Corp. and The Atlantic for some of the content that’ll be delivered through its AI search tool. But the terms of those agreements are unknown.

In the near term, OpenAI says it wants to test the search feature with a small set of users, and with publishers. The company says it eventually wants to add AI search to the main ChatGPT app.

“ChatGPT is probably best positioned amongst all competitors to upset Google’s dominance in search, and aspects of the new interface, such as “visual answers,” appear to be innovative and potentially disruptive,” says Damian Rollison of the search marketing platform SOCi in a statement. “However . . . the incredibly complex requirements of maintaining a world-class search platform tap into areas of expertise where OpenAI has yet to demonstrate its capabilities.”

Google stock dropped from $174.48 to $170.30 on the news. Google rolled out its own version of AI search, called AI Overviews, to all users in the spring. But the company pulled back on the number of search types that would get an AI Overview after the tool began generating some wild and regrettable results.

The news may also be bad for Perplexity, which operates an AI-native “answer engine.” The company was founded well before either AI Overviews or SearchGPT were announced, and has built some impressive features. Perplexity, now valued at more than $1 billion, had hoped it could carve out a niche for itself before Google and OpenAI dove into AI-native search. (Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas declined to comment on the OpenAI announcement.)

Publishers have been very wary of AI search, because unlike traditional search engines, AI search engines are designed to pull snippets of information from the web, composing a direct answer for the user. That means users won’t have much need to click on a link to the publisher’s websites, though. OpenAI says it’ll put the citations and links to the publisher sites prominently in the search result.

Perplexity has been accused in the media of cribbing information from publishers without permissions, and for crawling the websites of publishers even after the websites posted a “do not scrape” code.

OpenAI may have learned from Perplexity’s mistakes, says Jim Yu, CEO of the search engine optimization platform BrightEdge. Yu says this may be the reason OpenAI was careful to come out of the gate talking about content agreements with publishers, and about clear citations and links out to publisher sites.

Still, BrightEdge research shows that Perplexity’s referrals to brands and publishers grew by 40% every month of the first quarter, and by 30% in April, May, and June.

The OpenAI announcement, and the reaction to it, seems to underline once again that our way of pulling information from the vast internet may be changing.