Why Some Google Competitors Don’t Want Google To Share Its Search Data

Federal judge Amit Mehta is expected to shortly issue a ruling on what changes Google needs to make to its search business to fix its monopoly of the search ad market. Mehta’s decision could have ripple effects across the search market, which includes older rivals like Microsoft’s Bing and Brave as well as newcomers like OpenAI and Perplexity.

Surprisingly, though, some Google competitors are arguing that forcing Google to share its search data with rivals—one possible remedy—could actually cement Google’s dominant position in the search engine market, rather than encourage competition. 

One CEO of a rival search engine firm said that doing so could make Google’s rivals more dependent on its data. And if Google is forced to make its search data available through an application programming interface, it could make companies like Bing and Brave, who offer search APIs today and have spent years developing their own search indices, less attractive as providers because Google would be able to offer the same service at a much lower price given its scale. 

On the other side of the argument is OpenAI, whose executives have asked Google in the past for access to its data and have admitted that it would be near impossible to recreate Google levels of accuracy on its own. (That’s one reason why it’s using Google data through a third-party scraper called SerpApi, as we reported last week.)