The media industry has entered into a bitter conflict with tech giant OpenAI and its new search engine SearchGPT, just as it was starting to gain momentum. More than a dozen well-known news sites from the top 1000 popular resources on the planet have decided to close access to their content for the new AI search engine.
The New York Times, Wired, The New Yorker and other well-known news sources have joined forces against SearchGPT, which could seriously affect the quality and accuracy of the new service’s search results, threatening its competitiveness against giants like Google.
Publishers are skeptical of OpenAI’s claims that its OAI-SearchBot is not a spy collecting data for GPT-5, fearing that a company that has previously been transparent about its data collection methods may have hidden agendas.
Content owners worry that savvy AI search engines could begin to provide users with article summaries without redirecting them to the original site, threatening both traffic and publishers’ revenue. But OpenAI insists that being open to the bot will help sites stay visible in search results and attract more readers.
This conflict, apparently, will only flare up more and more brightly.
