Documents and presentations published in competition proceedings provide a good insight into how OpenAI and Sam Altman view the market for AI search and AI chatbots. While the OpenAI CEO himself doesn’t believe OpenAI has a chance of replacing Google, the distinction between AI chatbots and AI search is interesting:
In the “traditional” chatbot space, OpenAI sees its competition from Claude from Anthropic, Gemini from Google, Copilot from Microsoft, and even Meta AI. While OpenAI is currently the leader here, they need to defend this position and want to achieve this with the best free model, the best UI, and the strongest brand. My guess from the redacted text is that they see Meta as the biggest competitor in this space. In products like WhatsApp and Instagram, AI functionality doesn’t cannibalize the original business.
In the area of AI search, the situation is different: Here, OpenAI primarily sees Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews as competitors. While Perplexity has significantly fewer searches than OpenAI’s web search, Google is significantly larger and more successful. OpenAI estimates that AI Overviews currently serve nearly 600 million daily searches – approximately 7% of all Google searches.
