Google’s Bard is an AI tool of the same stripe as the now household name ChatGPT, with the major addition of being able to search the internet. It was released in response to Microsoft’s Bing Chat, which made the news as the first AI chat system integrated directly with a major web search platform.
The deployment of Bard and Bing Chat signals a major shake up in web search. Signs point to a near future where users have their queries answered by an interactive AI research assistant, rather than being directed to other websites.
These websites that the AI assistant is using as sources will be referenced and linked to, but it is obvious that most users will have little reason to actually go to those sites. Web search providers like Google and Bing are likely to become more like all-seeing crystal balls than website directories.
This future would see search platforms swallow a large portion of web traffic, as information-based websites are starved of clicks and advertising income.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, this is a serious concern for the major search platforms’ parent companies Google and Microsoft.
Both Google and Microsoft are also web advertising brokers, and would be directly harmed by the diversion of traffic from ad-based websites.
Importantly though, Google would be far harder hit by this than Microsoft. Google is far and away the largest web advertising provider, bringing in roughly twelve times more revenue through ads than Microsoft. This makes the development of Bing Chat a fascinatingly good business move.
First, it forces Google to answer with their own AI web search assistant or face the first real threat to its de facto monopoly in over a decade. However, the adoption of AI web search would also threaten to disrupt Google’s significant stake in online advertising.
To be clear, web advertising is not going anywhere, it will simply take new forms. It seems inevitable that just as you can pay Google to place your product on the top of a search page, you will in future be able to pay to have Bard or Bing Chat mention your product to users.
Google has been notably silent about the ways that generative AI will transform the web search landscape, and the web ads space in turn. This is unsurprising, as the way forward is not obvious. It will also involve the difficult practical and public relations problems of integrating paid ads into an AI assistant.
How great the change will be, and how quickly it arrives, will depend on how aggressively Google and Microsoft push users towards AI assistants over regular search.
For now, Bard and Bing Chat are notable as the first freely available AI assistant tools that can access the internet. They share the wide range of capabilities that come with the latest large language models like ChatGPT. This includes a huge range of tasks that involve generating language, such as translation, summarisation, creating emails and writing code.
No matter how things shake out in the web search space, it seems that AI assistants are set to be increasingly integrated into the world at multiple levels, from internet services to education and the workplace.
James Browning is a freelance tech writer and local music journalist.
BUSINESS REPORT