BofA analyst Justin Post notes that The Information reported that Meta (META) is developing a search engine that scans the web to provide conversational answers about current events and news in its Meta AI chatbot. While Meta’s AI initiatives are “not a surprise,” the growing news flow on potential competition in Search remains “a sentiment negative” for Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) and Google search, the analyst tells investors. Still, the firm thinks Meta will be at a data and web scraping disadvantage compared to Google given the still limited number of Meta AI users, the analyst added. The firm, which sees a possibility that a portion of internet traffic could shift away from Google Search, which currently is leading the market with 90% Search share globally, thinks Google “could (and should) highlight new AI Overview capabilities” and any related search query traction to improve increasingly cautious sentiment on search share risk.
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