The Big One of Search: Apple Eyes Seismic AI Search Replacement As Legal Rumblings Hit Google

Google’s overwhelming search share dominance has had a weathered patina of invincibility for what in the digital time-scale has been forever and a day.

Yet, while AI-centered competition has made definite inroads over the past year or so, it wasn’t until Apple’s recent indication that it has begun exploring AI search alternatives for its more than two billion devices that Google’s search supremacy has been truly under serious threat.

New AI entrants in the search field are decidedly different from the traditional search engine competitors Google has successfully fended off for decades now.

“I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way,” Eddy Cue, Apple senior vice president of services recently noted as part of a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit against Google parent firm Alphabet.

“Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices,” Cue noted. “AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants,” Cue added.

Google has had a longstanding search agreement with Apple that has been estimated to top the $20 billion mark annually, in order to make the search giant the default for searches performed on Apple devices.

For its part, Google has contended that Apple device searches have grown. “We continue to see overall query growth in search,” Google noted in a rare statement published the day of Cue’s legal testimony. “That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platforms,” Google added.

Apple however has observed a drop in Google search queries from within its Safari browser, noting that the decrease took place, “in the past two months for the first time in over 20 years,” Cue noted.

With Apple’s recent disclosure that it’s looking at AI search alternatives, along with the swift rise in the number of AI technology firms expanding their existing web search capabilities or adding altogether new ones, we wanted to take a look at how these shifts — and recent legal action against Google — are affecting the SEO industry.

Let’s jump right in.

ANTHROPIC AMONG THE LATEST AI FIRMS ADDING WEB SEARCH

Anthropic has recently launched deep research and new application programming interface (API) features, bringing web search capabilities to its popular Claude AI large language model (LLM).

These additions bring what has become a key feature for AI tool users, who are increasingly looking to take full advantage of working with and researching current information, rather than the limited sets of data contained in the first iterations of non-web-search-equipped AI tools.

“With Anthropic’s new web search API, Claude pulls real-time information from websites, using a privacy-first and citation-friendly approach,” Colleen Tuohy, head of marketing and growth at Scrunch AI recently observed.

“That’s huge for digital marketers and website operators trying to stay visible and accurate in AI-generated answers,” Tuohy added.

We recently featured Scrunch AI CEO and co-founder Chris Andrew on our Voices of Search Podcast, exploring the latest in AI-driven search alongside our own CEO and co-founder Jordan Koene, including a look at maintaining brand relevance in today’s increasingly AI-powered search environments.

Anthropic is only the latest AI tool firm to make web searching a focus, joining a cadre of other LLM models that each in their own way present new challenges to Google’s search dominance.

Let’s take a look at how traditional SEO strategy is changing, what still works, and how Google’s search influence is shifting.

GOOGLE’S FORCED SHAKEUP & COMPETITION FROM AI SEARCH

Between Google being the target of recent search monopoly legal actions in the U.S. and European Union and an unprecedented rise in search traffic coming from a slew of relatively new AI tool firms, Google is facing competition from multiple directions, which seem poised to combine and cause the search landscape to dramatically change in ways not seen for decades.

Even in the relatively new field of AI, it should not be forgotten that Google is still one of the established AI players, with its Gemini technology among the top industry contenders, as shown in our own Previsible AI SEO Benchmark leaderboard.

If you haven’t yet seen this industry-first AI SEO benchmark, you can learn how it tracks the leading AI tools as they tackle expert-level SEO questions in our co-founder David Bell’s “Leaderboard Launch: Previsible’s New AI SEO Benchmark.”

Google’s push with Gemini to hold a primary role among its AI search competition has not been overlooked by the prosecutors in the Justice Department’s case.

“Google is using the same strategy that they did for search and now applying it to Gemini,” David Dahlquist, a Department of Justice lawyer, recently noted.

This comes as Google also continues to further integrate AI into its existing traditional search offerings, with company CEO Sundar Pichai recently noting that more than 1.5 billion customers have utilized its AI Overviews each month.

The remedies sought by U.S. litigators include forcing Google to share proprietary search usage data with competitors including AI tool firms, along with a push to require the search giant to sell its booming Chrome browser.

SEO professionals are faced with a new world of AI search challenges such as these arising almost daily, and despite a future of uncertainty, there are still fundamental practices that thankfully have enduring qualities.

While Google confronts roadblocks from Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, Deepseek, Microsoft, xAI and others, savvy SEO professionals can simultaneously adjust to the latest shifts in AI search while relying on key foundational SEO strategies, including the following five:

• Providing best-answer content that fills the key needs of today’s searchers
• Taking advantage of optimization opportunities that cross traditional search and AI search boundaries
• Embracing flexibility by testing and iterating on each new AI search incarnation from the major AI search players
• Harnessing AI search to help build and strengthen human relationships and connect with audiences and potential customers
• Getting creative in adapting successful traditional SEO techniques to the new world of AI search

Additionally, the most successful SEO professionals are those who continue to adapt to the latest core search updates from Google, as I recently explored in, “Google’s Latest Core Update: What It Means For SEO & AI, Plus Top Takeaways From Search Central Live.”

SEO RUMBLINGS & FAULT-LINES, WHILE THE BIG ONE OF SEARCH LOOMS

AI search has brought seismic rumbles to Google’s dominance, but whether “the big one” of search ever comes to Mountain View — ushering in a new search leader — remains to be seen, as is the case for so many of the AI search changes taking place in 2025.

The legal actions against Google have highlighted the swift pace at which AI search has unfolded. Judge Amit P. Mehta recently noted that the ongoing case — which began in 2023 — has seen the integration of search and AI change from being “years away” to existing today.

What I can say is that in my 41 years of working in the technology industry, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a moment such as this, where the search industry could follow one of so many vastly-different paths each dominated by a different firm. What’s clear is that AI search is the next great iteration of how we search and learn, and how SEO professionals operate and optimize.

We hope that you’ve found this brief look at some of the latest challenges Google is facing from Apple, AI search competitors, and legal actions helpful, and that the insights we’ve shared will help with your own SEO efforts.

Crafting a successful SEO and AI strategy today requires ongoing dedication, significant time investment, and sound strategy, which is why more brands than ever are turning to dedicated SEO agencies with a deep understanding of AI such as Previsible. If you’re looking for proven SEO and AI search help from some of the industry’s top experts, please drop us a line today and let’s talk.