Google is considering charging for new ‘premium’ features powered by generative artificial intelligence, which would be the biggest shake-up ever in its search business, according to FT.
The proposed ‘restructuring’ of Google’s ‘cash cow’, i.e., the search engine, would mean that the company, for the first time, has placed any of its core products behind a paywall. Google is also considering adding new AI-powered search features to its subscription premium services, which already offer access to its new Gemini AI assistant in Gmail.
Classic Search Remains Free
Google’s traditional search engine would remain free, while ads would still appear alongside search results even for subscribers. However, charging would represent the first time that Google, which has offered free consumer services fully funded by advertising for many years, would compel people to pay for enhancements to its core search product. How this would all look is still unknown.
Google reported $175 billion in revenue from search and related ads last year, accounting for more than half of total sales.
Competitors Are Coming
Since November 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Google has struggled to respond to the competitive threat posed by the extremely popular chatbot. ChatGPT can provide quick and comprehensive answers to many questions, which could render lists of links from traditional search engines and the ads that appear alongside them redundant. The only problem is that ChatGPT still occasionally provides incorrect answers, so everything needs to be verified, most often through Google’s search engine.
Google began testing an experimental AI-powered search service in May of last year, displaying more detailed answers to queries while continuing to present users with links to additional information and advertising. However, it has been slow to add any features from what it calls the ‘Search Generative Experience’ experiment to its main search engine.
An additional problem for Google is that such AI-powered search is costly because generative artificial intelligence consumes far more computing resources.
Microsoft, which has an extensive partnership with OpenAI, launched enhanced search powered by GPT and a chatbot, now called Copilot, in its Bing search engine over a year ago. However, the new AI features have not done much to increase Bing’s market share, which still lags far behind Google.
Some analysts have warned that Google’s advertising business could suffer if its search engine provides more complete AI-generated answers that no longer require users to click through to advertisers’ websites. Additionally, many online publishers who rely on Google for web traffic fear that fewer users will visit their sites if Google’s AI-powered search extracts information from their websites and displays it directly to users.
Google has added a new premium tier to its Google One subscription service for users who wanted to use its most advanced Gemini chatbot. It also added Gemini to Workspace, its suite of online productivity applications such as Gmail and Docs.
Nothing Without Ads
It is unclear how exactly the company will seek to integrate AI-powered search into these paid services, which offer different pricing tiers, or when the AI-powered search offering will be ready. However, Google may decide to roll out certain elements of its AI-based experimental service into its main, free search engine over time, according to people familiar with its thinking.
Google has stated that the company ‘is not working on or considering’ an ad-free search experience, but will ‘continue to build new premium features and services to enhance our Google subscription offering’.
For years, we have been reinventing search to help people access information in the way that feels most natural to them. With our generative AI experiments in search, we have already served billions of queries and are seeing positive growth in search queries across all our major markets. We continue to rapidly improve the product to meet the needs of new users – Google representatives said.
