Google vs. OpenAI: How the search giant sprang into action to combat an existential threat (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI’s 2022 ChatGPT launch jolted Google into a rapid three‑year overhaul: the company merged internal AI teams, shelved earlier projects like DeepMind’s Sparrow, and aggressively folded generative models into core products. The result: Gemini 3 — a highly touted LLM launched this month and embedded into Search on day one — plus new AI Overviews and an “AI Mode” that reframes search as a conversational, answer‑first experience. Google’s edge is technical breadth: frontier research teams, custom AI chips, and one of the largest cloud infrastructures and product distributions in tech, allowing it to deploy models at internet scale. That pivot matters because it changes how users find and advertisers reach information, and poses existential questions for the web. Analysts at EMARKETER now expect Google’s share of search ads to dip below 50% within a year, while a Pew‑style sample showed click‑throughs drop from ~15% to 8% when AI summaries appear. Publishers and platforms warn that fewer clicks could undermine the incentive to produce original content, prompting calls for new business models (e.g., compensation for training data). Google argues overall queries and transactional searches still sustain ad revenue, but the long‑term implications—how to keep a healthy content ecosystem when LLMs “eat the internet”—remain unresolved.