The AI search wars are officially on, with Google giving Gemini access to its online answer engine just hours before OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search. Google is primarily targeting developers with its new feature, “Grounding with Google Search,” though the Alphabet company used the occasion to also tout its new search return template, AI Overviews. Launched last week, ChatGPT Search offers responses in real time using a conversational format. Initially, it is available only to ChatGPT Plus and Teams subscribers as well as those on the SearchGPT waitlist as part of ChatGPT’s existing interface.

OpenAI says it plans to add enterprise and education users in the coming weeks and will eventually make a free version available. Those granted access can tap the feature across all platforms — iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS and through ChatGPT.com.

The ChatGPT Search feature can also “manually trigger web searches,” The Verge explains, describing a demo in which a search for news about Apple stock returned “an interactive stock graph, upcoming earnings information, and news articles with clickable citations linking to original sources.”

“ChatGPT search connects people with original, high-quality content from the web and makes it part of their conversation,” OpenAI wrote in a news post that says the feature was designed to be more information-rich and less effort intensive than traditional search.

The company touted its relationships with publishers including Associated Press, Condé Nast, Reuters, Time, The Atlantic, Vox Media and more, adding that “any website or publisher can choose to appear in ChatGPT Search.”

The debut of ChatGPT search puts puts OpenAI into what VentureBeat calls “a three-way race” that also includes its principal investor, Microsoft, which has been offering realtime conversational AI with Internet sourcing with Copilot for some time, and Google, which added the feature more recently through Gemini.

The VentureBeat article takes readers “inside the $49 billion battle for the future of search,” discussing Google’s move to put “search-augmented responses into developer workflows” with Grounding with Google Search.

“Running these systems requires massive computing resources — OpenAI expects to spend $5 billion on computing costs this year alone,” VentureBeat writes.

The return on investment can also be big. Google, which claimed $49.4 billion from search advertising revenue for the third quarter, “faces growing pressure from AI-powered alternatives,” VB says. Last week it expanded its AI Overviews to 100 additional countries.