The U.S. Justice Department is suing Google (or Alphabet Inc., if you prefer), and in testimony today, Apple Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue dropped a bombshell in the courtroom: Apple is now “actively looking” at focusing its Safari web browser on AI search instead of Google Search.
As Bloomberg reported, the revelation marks a “seismic shift for the industry.”
The default search tool used by a web browser with only 18% market share might not seem like a seismic announcement, but it’s further proof that a massive shift is underway. And that shift threatens one of the foundations of the internet as we know it: Google Search.
As of this writing, Alphabet stock is down 7.5 percent for the day, a sharp drop.
Why AI search matters
Increasingly, some users are relying on AI chatbots like ChatGPT for their web searches. Just today, the AI company Anthropic announced a new API that would expand the search capabilities of its Claude AI models. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has also been encroaching on Google Search’s territory, first with the introduction of ChatGPT Search in October 2024 and more recently with new shopping features.
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Now, even Apple is signaling a shift toward AI search — and away from Google. Due to the dominance of Apple iPhones, Apple’s approach to search will have much wider impacts across the web.
Apple also stands to lose significant revenue as a result of the Justice Department’s lawsuit, which highlighted the payments Google makes to Apple to use Google as the default search engine on Safari.
In his testimony, Cue seemed to defend the relationship, which nets Apple $20 billion a year. By highlighting the inevitable shift toward AI search, Cue suggested that Google’s search monopoly is naturally coming to an end.
The news isn’t all bleak for Google, however.
The company’s Gemini AI model has surged to the top of some AI leaderboards, largely due to the truly mind-boggling amount of data Google has at its disposal. And Google itself is diving headfirst into AI search, first with the introduction of AI overviews, and then with the beta for AI Mode, a new chatbot-style search tool.
If the trend wasn’t clear before, it is now: the era of Google Search is ending, and the era of AI search is nigh.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.