Before the internet, people visited the local library to look up specific information or paged through the telephone directory to search for places to buy a particular product. Back then, a search for information might have been influenced by a newspaper story or a television ad. Now in the internet age, despite an abundance of sources of information from dedicated applications or on the web, Google has become synonymous with ‘search’. Google’s ubiquity has brought scrutiny from antitrust regulators around the world. However, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s CoPilot, and X.AI’s Grok offer a new source of information. Interestingly, a survey commissioned by the UK’s Competition Market Authority (CMA) found that even before AI, Google already faced the greatest competition in the commercial side of the market. According to the CMA, consumers searching for a product used shopping websites or apps 39% of the time compared to 54% using search engines like Google or Bing.
Source: UK CMA, June 2025