“There is no competition, practically speaking, because it’s not about the consumer, it’s about the advertiser,” said Brian Wieser, a longtime ad watcher and Principal at Madison and Wall. “There’s two things that can happen, and they’re independent of each other to a large degree in the short term. One is that you can have more competition from a consumer perspective, but until there’s a commercial operation, there won’t be any shift to budget.” Google will likely face advertising competition from today’s AI upstarts, but it doesn’t seem to be a threat with any immediacy. The technology has moved slower than the hype, with no “fast takeoff,” giving Google time to adjust. And OpenAI doesn’t have any serious ads push underway, though that will inevitably come. “What’s almost certainly going to happen next year is that ChatGPT is going to start charging for the leads they’re generating,” said Evercore ISI’s Mahaney.
There may be an alternative business model for AI search that does not assume dependence on search advertising. Rather than bucketing fears around ad revenue disruption, companies could curate knowledge based on the value their customers would pay for directly — making the product the information itself, not the attention it captures.
