Recently I’ve found myself turning to ChatGPT rather than Google when I want to, wait, Google something. Almost unthinkable isn’t it? A tool that’s predecessor was essentially looking through books in the library seems outdated in the face of AI. Almost overnight, Google’s SERP looks slow and even inaccurate compared to the intuitive prose of Open AI’s ChatGPT offering. And these two elements, speed and accuracy, really matter when it comes to search. Henry Ford famously quipped that if you asked consumers what they needed to get from A to B before the invention of the motor car they would have replied ‘a faster horse.’ And whilst LLMs, at least in the search space, don’t seem to be a paradigm shifting epoch like the internet vs the library, or Netflix vs the DVD, they do seem to offer consumers a faster horse. Google is looking slow out the gates.
Bezos & AI – coming for Google
Earlier in the month, bond villain in waiting Jeff Bezoz announced a $73m investment in Perplexity, a LLM that aims to challenge Google’s dominance in the search space. The company only has 38 employees and has done next to nothing in terms of marketing but, get this, is already receiving 0.5bn queries per week. Now, I don’t think we should read into this too much; Google and parent company Alphabet are one hell of a Goliath for a small company to slay. Over the last decade, Google has become almost the basis of the internet or how most people interact with it at the very least. This isn’t Google’s first rodeo either. Back in 2019 Sridhar Ramaswamy, then head of Google’s search team, left to found Neeva, a subscription based search engine. The company sought to address Goggle’s accuracy issues with a subscriber based model. The founder’s hope that Google’s ad supported SERP, with many sponsored links, was enough of a pain point to drive users to a more accurate subscriber based model. It wasn’t. And whilst the company had some initial success, raising over $77m, it was forced to close its doors last year. The main reason? They couldn’t persuade customers to switch from faithful old Google – accuracy just wasn’t enough of a draw for the stressed office worker or mum of 3. But never before has someone sought to challenge Google on the other side of that coin – speed.
Choice is not a luxury in 2024
Whether it’s shopping, entertainment or eating, the internet has meant we’re surrounded by endless choices in our day to day lives. But often, having so many options can feel a little, well, overwhelming. Across categories we’ve seen consumer preference change from a ‘more is more’ attitude to a push towards curation and personalisation. And this is why both AI and the algorithm have gained so much traction. The average household spends 10 minutes per day deciding what to watch on Netflix, whereas TikTok uses its algorithm to decide what content I already like so I don’t have to scroll endlessly through films I won’t like featuring Dwayne The Rock Johnson. Search is just the same. When compared to an LLM, the ten blue links at the top of Google represent a choice I increasingly don’t want to have to make. At its heart, the core value proposition of AI search is that it will give you one result that might be less accurate, but is a whole lot faster than sifting through ten different sites.
Google’s main problem
Google is really a victim of its own success in the search space. The giant is making so much return and continued dominance from its core business that you can understand why Alphabet was reluctant to change its offering beyond optimisation. But innovation waits for no man and there comes a point where businesses must cannibalise their own offerings in order to stay on top. Have you listened to your ipod lately? Me neither. A master of foresight, Steve jobs decided to spin the existing ipod into an app on the iPhone in 2007, seeing that the future was application based early doors. It feels like Google should take a leaf out of Apple’s book – it’s time to innovate to stay ahead.
Google’s main opportunity
Now I know what you’re thinking, am I really predicting the writing’s on the wall for the third most valuable tech company in the world? Absolutely not. Despite the above, Google is actually still best placed to dominate the AI search space and it comes down to two things. Differentiation and consolidation. By definition, LLMs are difficult to differentiate in the eyes of consumers. They can easily reverse engineer each other’s offerings and user interfaces, making the real differentiator the content they’re trained on. This is where Google is primed to win. The company collects more data than any other on its individual users. It’s got access to your email preferences, your calendar, search history and YouTube viewing habits. If I were to search what is the best kettle for me in a range of AI searches, I would hazard that Google has the most relevant data there. If the core proposition of AI search is personalisation, convenience and accuracy, Google can draw on better quality intel than the rest. It is also a brand people have heard of, and are comfortable with using. Over 50% of adults described a lack of confidence with AI products and Google offers a trusted, familiar partner to these users with continuity at its heart. Moving on to consolidation, Google is famous for putting many search media types in one place. Web, images, videos, books – they’re all there under one roof and at the moment, the consumer facing LLM space feels fragmented. Generative image AI like mid journey, generative video and developer interfaces all sit in different places currently. Alphabet, with its 1.4 trillion dollar market, is placed to acquire and consolidate a range of AI search functions and consolidate them in a manner which consumers are familiar with.
It will be interesting to see how the tech giant responds across the coming year, but our prediction is that, as with social media, the early players will get eaten up and any first mover advantage will count for little in the face of Alphabet and Google.
For more insights into search marketing contact the Rabbits team on info@wearerabbits.co.uk
