Bing, the new AI-powered search engine, will affect my online business.

Today I received the email from Microsoft Bing with the message “You’re in! Welcome to the new Bing!“.

I was delighted and immediately started using the new Bing (the version that includes the benefits of artificial intelligence provided by ChatGpt, through the new chat assistant implemented in Bing).

After half a day of use I can say it’s Wooooow! I’m thrilled!
I even set my Edge browser as my default browser. That’s a big deal, considering that up until now I’ve exclusively used Brave and Chrome browsers for web browsing.

But as I use the new Bing, I’m starting to ask myself various questions that make me a little uneasy. My business is in the internet business, and the new Bing implementation is likely to bring radical changes to this area.

1. Bing is likely to gain a significant share of the search engine market. Google now has 87% of the market and Bing has 9%, and there is every chance that in the not too distant future Bing will overtake Google. And this wouldn’t be a problem for me if it didn’t affect the ranking of the sites I manage (mine and my clients’) from an SEO point of view, i.e. the positioning of the sites in searches.

2. I explained in the previous article “Implications of Bing and ChatGPT on SEO optimization“, how Bing can change the visibility of websites in the search process. If you now have a website that ranks on the first page of Google searches (a position achieved with a lot of hard work, time and money invested), your website might for example appear on page 5 of Bing searches (if Bing does not use the same ranking criteria as Google).

3. Internet blogs with informative articles such as answers to various questions will experience major drops in traffic.
And I’ll take the Webage blog as an example. Why would anyone read the article “How often should I redesign my website?” or the article “What is the most widely used personality test?” if you can get the answer directly and quickly from the Bing chat assistant?
What interest will bloggers have in writing such articles?

4. Wikipedia traffic will drop, and the irony is that the artificial intelligence platform ChatGpt has also trained itself on Wikipedia-derived data, which could become almost useless in the not-too-distant future.

5. It will decrease the traffic of discussion platforms like Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, 4chan, Voat, Hacker News, Medium, Digg etc. Why ask questions on Quora or Reddit if you can ask Bing? And the answers you get from Bing are short and to the point.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter I think will be the least affected.

Google’s monopoly era in web search I think is coming to an end.

Google actually started losing market share some time ago to Bing, small search engines but also to closed social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LikedIn, Reddit, TikTok etc.. users searching for desired information within these platforms.

But with the technological revolution brought about by ChatGpt, Bing currently has every chance of coming out on top unless Google quickly counteracts Bing’s advantage.

And even if it does, Google won’t be able to hold on to the huge market share it currently has.
And Microsoft have sensed this and will be revving their engines to the max to get a bigger piece of the pie.

Bill Gates also gave a signal some time ago. He bought more than $9 billion worth of Microsoft stock (see the video: Why Bill Gates Just Invested $9 Billion in Microsoft Stock). He must have put all the money he had left in his pocket.

Meanwhile, on the stock market, Google’s shares have fallen by $100 billion (see article: Google loses over $100 billion m-cap after AI chatbot Bard gives wrong answer in ad).

Let’s see what’s next …

Unbelievable!