• by Laurie Sullivan , 6 hours ago

Google recently reversed a trend that had been dragging down the company’s search market share for the past nine months.

That’s when BrightEdge, an AI-powered enterprise search engine optimization (SEO) and content performance platform, noticed Google’s search market share has begun to slowly decline, giving rise to OpenAI's ChatGPT and others.

Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, believes Google has done well “staving off the AI bleed and the search market has simply expanded around them.”

BrightEdge’s research, released Wednesday, shows Google increased share from 90.54% to 90.71%. Despite a modest uptick, the percentage amounts to billions in potential revenue as AI-powered rivals begin to chip away at the percentage.

Data suggests Google’s AI Mode contributed to its increase, with specific attention to long-tail queries. The data shows use of the search engine's new AI feature helping boost Google’s gains.

BrightEdge’s referral analysis also shows that the broader AI search ecosystem, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, still accounts for less than 1% of total referrals from search.

For the first time, BrightEdge observed that the collective group had lost market share.

Smaller players like X’s Grok and Anthropic’s Claude continue to grow market share, although at a slower rate.

Putting the growth into perspective, Claude's referrals are 60 times smaller than ChatGPT's, and Grok's are 200 times smaller.

Google will need to continually grapple with the rise of AI-based search and browsers like Anthropic's "Comet" as well as OpenAI's "Atlas," which launched Wednesday.

Financial services company HSBC reported that while OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas browser with agentic capabilities is a competitor to Google Chrome, its features are not unique. Google described similar capabilities for Chrome in a September blog post.

While HSBC analysts noted there are three special features in ChatGPT Atlas — chat that is always available, memory in the browser, and personalization the more the browser is used — the browser features are not unique, according to one report.