Safari changes the rules: new players among Apple’s search engines

Apple is preparing to add generative AI-based search services from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic to the Safari browser — this information was announced by the company’s Senior Vice President of Services, Eddy Cue, during his testimony at the U.S. Department of Justice trial against Alphabet. This statement came amid an investigation into the annual agreement between Apple and Google, which brings Apple about twenty billion dollars a year for setting Google as the default search engine in Safari.

Cue noted that last month, for the first time in twenty-two years, the number of search queries in Safari decreased — a fact he attributes to the growing popularity of generative AI. Against this backdrop, Apple has already held talks with Perplexity and is considering cooperation with OpenAI and Anthropic to introduce new search options in Safari.

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According to Cue, the company does not plan to make these services the default, as he believes they still need improvement. At the same time, Apple wants to be ready to quickly change its approach if one of the models shows better results than the current market leaders.

Apple already has experience integrating ChatGPT with Siri, and last week it became known that Google is negotiating the implementation of Gemini on iPhone. Changes in Safari’s search ecosystem could affect not only users but also the company’s financial flows — since a decrease in the number of searches directly impacts advertising revenue that Apple receives thanks to its agreement with Google.