Report: ChatGPT Hasn’t Helped Bing Compete With Google

The addition of ChatGPT reportedly has not helped Microsoft’s Bing take on Google.

Microsoft added the generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool to its search engine early last year after investing $10 billion in ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

But according to a recent Bloomberg News report — which cited data analytics company StatCounter — Bing ended 2023 with just 3.4% of the worldwide search market, compared to Google’s 91.6% share.

That’s up less than 1 percentage point since the company announced the ChatGPT integration last January.

At best, the report said, adding ChatGPT helped Bing from declining even further. A month before the integration, people were spending 33% less time using the search engine than they had 12 months prior, the report said, citing SensorTower data.

But in the second quarter of last year, Bing’s active monthly users in the U.S. doubled year over year to 3.1 million, with users spending 84% more time on the search engine. Bing’s monthly active users grew to 4.4 million by the year’s end, the report said.

PYMNTS has contacted Microsoft for comment but has not yet received a reply.

The news comes as other competitors are seeking to use AI to try to unseat Google from its number one spot in the search market, such as Perplexity, which earlier this month announced a Series B funding round that valued the company at $520 million. Google, meanwhile, has continued to tweak its own product.

“That’s because we increasingly stand at an inflection point of a massive behavioral shift in how people access information online — and platforms built by Perplexity, Google, and many other tech companies both large and small are all looking to capitalize on it,” PYMNTS wrote.

“We are at the gold rush moment when it comes to AI and search,” Shane Greenstein, an economist and professor at Harvard Business School, told Bloomberg. “At the moment, I doubt AI will move the needle because, in search, you need a flywheel: the more searches you have, the better answers are. Google is the only firm who has this dynamic well-established.”

And as noted here in early January, part of Google’s ongoing dominance comes from the cost of running AI systems, which “makes the unit economics somewhat unfeasible for certain tasks.”

Some estimates put the cost of a single ChatGPT query at 1,000 times that of the same question asked of a normal Google search, “making the margins for AI applications smaller than other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions,” PYMNTS wrote.