Early Adopters Are Ditching Google Search for AI Chatbots
A major shift in how people search the web would upend the economy of the internet, posing a major challenge to one of tech’s biggest companies.
Illustration: Masha Titova for Bloomberg Businessweek
Planning a camping trip, Matthew Berman remembered hearing that pitching your tent on top of your car instead of on the ground was a good way to avoid animal encounters. It was the kind of claim Berman used to assess by typing into Google’s search engine. Now he turns to a chatbot called Perplexity.
Berman likes that Perplexity, which markets itself as an “AI-powered answer engine,” gives him concise responses to his questions instead of a list of links (though the answers do come with citations linking to relevant sources). “It’s really just about the time investment,” says Berman, who founded a tech startup called Sonar to help businesses manage their text messages, and now makes videos and writes a newsletter about artificial intelligence.