Google might be one of the biggest companies in the world, but its stock price seems to be very vulnerable to the announcements of a plucky new competitor.
Google’s stock price fell more than 3% in trade after OpenAI hinted at launching a new browser. “10 am livestream today to launch a new product I’m quite excited about!” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X. He added a video which showed what looked like browser tabs, hinting that OpenAI was about to announce its own browser product.
Around the same time, Google’s stock — which had rallied smartly the last few days — immediately fell more than 3%. Google’s stock had been trading at around $255, but fell to $247 in a matter of minutes.
Google investors seemed jittery about how OpenAI’s new browser could impact Google’s own Chrome browser. Google had recently been allowed to keep its Chrome browser and not spin it off in an anticompetitive lawsuit, and this had prompted Google’s stock to rally more than 20% in the last few months. Chrome is critical to Google’s search dominance — Google is the default search engine on Chrome, which allows it to maintain its market leadership in search. A new browser, however, could threaten this. If OpenAI’s browser ends up being popular, it would likely default to ChatGPT for search queries, which could eat into Google search’s usage.
But there have been other AI-first browsers out there, and they don’t seem to have impacted Google Chrome very much. Perplexity had released its own Comet browser several months ago, but it hasn’t really become mainstream, and hasn’t seen much adoption. ChatGPT, however, is a much bigger brand — it is now the fifth-most-visited website in the world — and if it can create clever integrations with its core product, power users of the service could considering switching to its browser. It remains to be seen how OpenAI’s browser fares, but even before its launch, it’s causes ripples in the stock prices of its would-be competitors.