No, it's the other way around. Right now web search is "disruptive" to the LLM business model.
Google is a business fundamentally oriented around loss leaders. They make money on commercial queries where someone wants to buy something. They lose money when people search for facts or knowledge. The model works because people don't want to change their search engine every five minutes, so being good at the money losing queries means people will naturally use you for the money making queries too.
Right now LLMs take all the money losing queries and spend vast sums of investor capital on serving them, but they are useless for queries like [pizza near me] or [medical injury legal advice] or [holidays in the canary islands]. So right now I'd expect actually Google to do quite well. Their competitor is burning capital taking away all the stuff that they don't really want, whilst leaving them with the gold.
Now of course, that's today. The obvious direction for OpenAI to go in is finding ways to integrate ads with the free version of ChatGPT. But that's super hard. Building an ad network is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it's really unclear what the product looks like there. Ads on web search is pretty obvious: the ads look like search results. What does an ad look like in a ChatGPT response?
Google have plenty of time to figure this out because OpenAI don't seem interested. They've apparently decided that all of ChatGPT is a loss leader for their API services. Whether that's financially sustainable or not is unclear, but it's also irrelevant. People still want to do commercial queries, they still want things like real images and maps and yes even ads (the way the ad auction works on Google is a very good ranking signal for many businesses). ChatGPT is still useless for them, so for now they will continue to leave money on the table where Google can keep picking it up.
Google is a business fundamentally oriented around loss leaders. They make money on commercial queries where someone wants to buy something. They lose money when people search for facts or knowledge. The model works because people don't want to change their search engine every five minutes, so being good at the money losing queries means people will naturally use you for the money making queries too.
Right now LLMs take all the money losing queries and spend vast sums of investor capital on serving them, but they are useless for queries like [pizza near me] or [medical injury legal advice] or [holidays in the canary islands]. So right now I'd expect actually Google to do quite well. Their competitor is burning capital taking away all the stuff that they don't really want, whilst leaving them with the gold.
Now of course, that's today. The obvious direction for OpenAI to go in is finding ways to integrate ads with the free version of ChatGPT. But that's super hard. Building an ad network is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it's really unclear what the product looks like there. Ads on web search is pretty obvious: the ads look like search results. What does an ad look like in a ChatGPT response?
Google have plenty of time to figure this out because OpenAI don't seem interested. They've apparently decided that all of ChatGPT is a loss leader for their API services. Whether that's financially sustainable or not is unclear, but it's also irrelevant. People still want to do commercial queries, they still want things like real images and maps and yes even ads (the way the ad auction works on Google is a very good ranking signal for many businesses). ChatGPT is still useless for them, so for now they will continue to leave money on the table where Google can keep picking it up.