• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 17, 2024

The rise of traditional AI search engines from Google and Microsoft skyrocketed in the past month, but newcomers have begun to take significant market share. This will change the dynamics in 2025.

A link to advertising will also make a difference because it will change from informational to actionable -- especially as more consumers adopt AI agents that can perform tasks.

OpenAI’s search engine grew 44% in referral traffic last month sequentially, and has become six times more popular compared with Perplexity -- which grew 71% in referral traffic, according to BrightEdge data.

“OpenAI will probably take about 1% of the search market in 2025,” said Jim Yu, CEO at BrightEdge, adding: “That’s a huge change. For the longest time there has been no new entrants that to secure material market share.”

Yu does not believe this will impact Microsoft’s market share because OpenAI’s AI search tool is built into ChatGPT, which still relies to an extent on Bing’s index. He said he will keep an eye on how marketers optimize a very different experience next year.

Google still dominates the industry — with estimates suggesting it holds 92.4% of market share. AI Overviews reaches more than 1 billion users globally and is becoming increasingly integrated with search, as the company rolls it out worldwide in an effort to maintain its dominance.

One of the interesting changes this month for Google has been a focus on AI Overviews supporting the B2B space and the link to YouTube audio and video, as seen by BrightEdge data.

YouTube in AI Overviews has stabilized with multimodal support. For example, a query in search for “how to clean an electric kettle” cites YouTube and provides a direct link to that specific moment in the video.

“You can see how Google’s multimodal AI leverages not only written content, but also video and audio,” Yu says. “I think for marketers it means they have really developed video content for some of these common customer and consumer queries.”

During the past 18 months, BrightEdge’s data has identified mostly large language models that have been text-based, but recently the company began to see multimodal AI that includes audio and video in its data.

Ecommerce across Google demonstrated interesting interactions in November, particularly during Black Friday.

Monthly metrics from BrightEdge showed a complex pattern. Early November peaks of more than 40% from mid-October stabilized mid-month around a traditional baseline

The Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend data revealed AI's ability to dynamically adapt to shopping-focused user intent.

Traditional list-based formats dominated pre-holiday results and saw a sharp decline of about 9.8% on Black Friday, with an additional 7.6% drop by November 30.

In their place, BrightEdge witnessed more sophisticated shopping presentations such as product viewers with more information about the product and buying options. This increased by 52.6%.

Group product views rose by 8.2%, showing that AI Overviews are more effective at identifying shopping queries where users benefit from comparing multiple items simultaneously, particularly when comparing prices and finding the best product fit.