Here’s Why Meta Getting on the AI Search Bandwagon Could Change the Entire Online Ad Market

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, is so certain that he wants to transform his social-media platform into a hardware and software tech giant that he renamed it Meta to capture the idea of an AR/VR metaverse. To keep up with the buzziest tech, as well as fancy 3-D graphics, Meta is also all in on AI. Now, news site The Information reports that in its battle to compete with market leader OpenAI, Meta is working on a “search engine that crawls the web” to generate “conversational answers about current events to people using its Meta AI chatbot.”

This means two things: AI search really is likely to be the next big thing, and the online ad game may change completely, with consequences though the entire digital economy.

The report, based on discussions with someone who has been in contact with Meta’s new search engine team, said the plan is to lower Meta’s reliance on Google search and Microsoft’s Bing engine, which “currently provide information about news, sports and stocks to people using Meta Al.” Essentially, when users chat with Meta’s AI bot, the company plans to maintain control over the entire interaction—and it will do this by gathering precise data on how users actually use the platform. That will allow Meta to sell hyper-targeted ads, which will command higher prices. Currently, if someone asks its bot a question it can’t answer, Meta has struck a deal with third-party suppliers to get fresh, up-to-date information. That breaks the chain of control over the users’ data.

By building its own AI search engine, Meta keeps all of that interaction in-house, increasing the chance that a user doesn’t click out of a Meta app into a third-party search or AI system to get the info they need. More time on Meta’s platform means more time to expose users to ads.

Developing its own engine may also give Meta resilience if Microsoft or Google back out of their existing deals, The Information notes. This is particularly interesting given that this sort of data-sharing search deal is very much in the regulatory spotlight. As part of the antitrust ruling against Google search that may see the company broken up, the Department of Justice highlighted a giant financial deal that saw Google paying for the privilege of being Apple’s default search engine for iPhones—and that deal may be forced to shutter. If regulators object to this sort of dependence on Google for other platforms, having its own AI search engine would be a good way for Meta to avoid scrutiny.

AI search is controversial. Though it’s hard to define, it essentially means an AI system like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini is able to do the Googling for you when you ask it for fresh data, like a score from an ongoing football game. Traditional chatbots, which rely on huge amounts of training data, tend not to have real-time info like this baked into their algorithms (at least in this generation of AI tech,) but search engines do keep up on live data like this. Google embraced the tech with some fanfare a few months ago, but faced pushback from its ad partners and dialed back the effort. But the tech is definitely on its way—Microsoft is also developing a similar system, and OpenAI seems to be planning on trying to steal business from Google with its own AI search system. 

The controversy over AI search stems from two things: the unreliability or possibility of hallucination that dogs current AI chatbots, and the potential impact on the online advertising market. Online ads are how millions of businesses, small and large, attract customers, and a lot of the ad market is tied to Google’s long-established search system. Upending this system could totally change the ad game, affecting how third-party ad partners shape their ads and even changing how certain ads are shown to targeted users. That’s unsettling to many entrepreneurs whose businesses rely on these revenues.

Nevertheless, AI search really is on the horizon, and will require businesses and individual users to adjust to a major change in how they get information online. Just this week Google said it was expanding its AI search system to over 100 countries in multiple new languages.