Apple’s plans to add AI-powered search options to its Safari browser are a big blow to Google, whose lucrative advertising business relies significantly on iPhone customers using its search engine.
The news slammed shares of Google-parent Alphabet, which closed down 7.3 percent, wiping off roughly $150 billion from its market value.
The iPhone maker was “actively looking at” reshaping Safari, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters, citing Apple executive Eddy Cue who was offering testimony at an antitrust case on Wednesday over Google’s dominance in online search.
Cue said searches on Safari fell for the first time last month due to users increasingly turning to AI, according to the source. Apple stock closed down 1.1 percent.
Google said that it continued to see growth in the overall number of search queries, including “total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms,” according to a statement posted on the company’s blog.
“People are seeing that Google Search is more useful for more of their queries — and they’re accessing it for new things and in new ways,” the company wrote.
Google cited voice and visual search features as contributors to total search volume growth. It was unclear whether Cue was using the same basis of comparison in his testimony when analizing types of searches.
Still, the Apple executive’s comments suggests that a seismic shift in search is likely underway, threatening Google’s dominant search business — a go-to advertising destination for marketers that has now become a target for US antitrust regulators, which filed two major lawsuits against the company.
Google is the default search engine on Apple’s browser, a coveted position for which it pays the iPhone maker roughly $20 billion a year, or about 36 percent of its search advertising revenue generated through the Safari browser, analysts have estimated.
Banning Google from paying companies to be the default search engine is among the remedies that the US Justice Department has proposed to break up its dominance in online search.
“The loss of exclusivity at Apple should have very severe consequences for Google even if there are no further measures,” D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.
“Many advertisers have all of their search advertising with Google because it is practically a monopoly with almost 90 percent share. If there were other viable alternatives for search, many advertisers could move much of their ad budgets away from Google,” Luria said.
Google is not defenseless.
Written off as an also-ran in the AI race by critics after ChatGPT’s buzzy launch in late 2022, Google has reached into its deep pockets to fund its AI efforts and leverage its vast data trove.
The company introduced an “AI mode” on its search page earlier this year, looking to retain its millions of users from going away to other AI models.
It recently expanded AI Overviews — summaries that appear atop the traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages on a search query — for users in more than 100 countries, and added advertisements to feature, boosting Search ad sales.
CEO Sundar Pichai said in a testimony at an antitrust trial last month that Google hopes to enter an agreement with Apple by the middle of this year to include its Gemini AI technology on new phones.
Apple’s Cue on Wednesday also said the company would add AI search providers, including OpenAI and Perplexity AI, as search options in the future, Bloomberg reported.
“(Apple’s plan) also shows how far generative search sites, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity have come,” said Yory Wurmser, principal analyst for advertising, media & technology at eMarketer.
That Google is willing to pay tens of billions of dollars to remain the default search engine shows how crucial the agreements are, Wurmser said.
For instance, ChatGPT in April reported seeing over 1 billion weekly web searches for its search feature. It has more than 400 million weekly active users, as of February

DUBAI: Streaming giant Netflix will begin rolling out a major revamp of its TV app’s homepage next week.

The new design “is simpler, more intuitive, and better represents the breadth of entertainment on Netflix today,” the company’s chief product officer, Eunice Kim, said on Tuesday.

It includes a navigation bar at the top of the screen, rather than the current position on the left, and more-responsive recommendations while a user browses the app.

Netflix’s chief technology officer Elizabeth Stone said that in making these recommendations the service “will pull in more signals,” such as search history and the trailers watched by a user.

“And because everything will happen seamlessly in the background, you won’t even notice it happening — it will just be magically easier to find something to watch,” she added.

The overall design will be more minimalist and cleaner, providing all the relevant information about a title in one place so as to reduce “eye gymnastics” and help users make an “informed choice,” Kim said.

The mobile app is also getting an overhaul, as Netflix tests the use of the favored video format on social media: vertical viewing. The vertical feed will feature clips from movies and TV shows that users can browse and then click on to visit to a title’s home page.

Netflix has previously used artificial intelligence technology across the platform for features such as recommendations but now, with advances in generative AI, it aims to go a step further by showcasing titles in more languages and including chatbot-like functionality.

For example, viewers can use conversational phrases such as “I want to watch something scary but not too scary” to search for content.

“Believe it or not, that search phrase will actually yield results in the new experience,” said Stone.

The company is also investing further in its content-delivery network, Open Connect, which optimizes streaming globally across differing internet speeds.

“Open Connect has given us a really strong foundation and now we’re building on that foundation as we deliver a broader and more complex variety of entertainment, including live events and games on TV,” Stone said.

“Entertaining the world is hard but technology makes it easier.”