Bing scores with AI

Including AI in the Bing search engine benefits Microsoft. Bing's visitors were up 15% in the last seven days, while Google's visitors were down 2.4%. Over the past 28 days, the number of visitors to both search engines increased: Bing's increased by 13.6% and Google's by 2.8%. Unfortunately, the research does not provide relative numbers (Google's market share is 9 to 10 times as large…).
Microsoft has included ChatGPT-like features in the Bing search engine. This gives users direct answers to questions, instead of being redirected to pages where the answer can be found, as with Google.
Even if we consider that the recent increase in visitor numbers is due to curiosity (wanting to try out Bing's new feature), Bing's visitor numbers have been steadily increasing in recent years, by as much as 10% year-over-year - often at the expense of Google. In short, Bing's traffic was already on the rise, but increased after it added its OpenAI chatbot to the search engine last February.

Bing vs. Google

Because the chatbot's "hallucinations" have been criticized, Bing users can now choose between a more "creative" version of the chatbot (more likely to hallucinate if it doesn't know the answer) or a more factual version.
There is one caveat. While Bing's growth looks impressive, Bing still has a long way to go to catch up with Google in terms of market share and number of visits. Google's lead is still huge (Google's market share is 85%, Bing's 9%). But Google is in a dilemma: should it see AI completely separate from the search engine, with the risk that Bing (with AI functions) will overtake them, or should it fully integrate AI into its search engine and thus endanger its revenue model (the income from advertisements)? The disappointing performance of Google's Bard chatbot shows that this wavering attitude is not helping innovation.