New business model
Google is flirting with fees for AI searches
April 4, 2024, 2:58 p.m
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Google is reacting to the AI trend and is considering a paid expansion of its search services. The step could mean a turning point in the internet giant’s previous free model. Competition from innovative AI chatbots is forcing new strategies.
According to the Financial Times, Google is considering charging fees in the future for certain functions that are based on artificial intelligence (AI). According to information from three people familiar with the matter, the search engine manufacturer is examining the extent to which certain AI-driven search functions can be integrated into premium subscription services.
It would be the first time that Google makes its users pay for an extension of its core business, free search. The desired change would therefore be a serious change to the business model. Meanwhile, traditional Google searches will remain free.
The Internet giant faces strong competition from, among others, the ChatGPT inventor OpenAI, which triggered a hype around AI just over a year ago. The company has a problem: How to leverage the latest AI innovations while remaining the biggest profit driver? Since November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Google has been struggling to keep up with the wildly popular chatbot. ChatGPT can provide quick and complete answers to many questions, threatening to make the link list of a traditional search engine like Google and the lucrative ads that appear alongside it obsolete.
It is still unclear how the company plans to integrate AI-supported search into its paid services and when it might be available. According to information from the Financial Times, it is also not impossible that Google will decide to integrate certain elements of the experimental AI-controlled services into its free main search engine over time.
Google says the company is not working on an ad-free search experience and is not considering doing so. “For years we have been reinventing search to help people access information in the way that comes most naturally to them,” the newspaper quoted the tech giant as saying. With its generative AI experiments in search, Google has already served billions of search queries and is recording positive growth in search queries. “We have nothing to announce at the moment.”