Watch out, Google: Meta is reportedly working on an AI-powered search engine

Meta is throwing its hat into the AI search engine ring.

According to a report from The Information, Meta is working on an AI-powered search engine to power its Meta AI feature on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Currently, the Meta AI search function uses Google Search and Microsoft's Bing to surface real-time information about news, sports, and stocks. Meta also recently struck a deal with Reuters for providing news reports in Meta AI responses.

But Meta's reported development of its own search engine is an effort to rely less on its competitors' search engines, especially if the circumstances of the arrangements change. The rise of generative AI, plus a decrease in Google Search quality, has many users turning to platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity instead of traditional search engines. With Meta going all on its flagship Meta AI search function, the company hopes to get users searching on its apps, although some find the Meta AI search bar annoying and intrusive since it can't be turned off.

Meta's search engine team has reportedly been indexing sites and organizing them into databases for at least eight months. As previously reported, Meta quietly launched a web crawler in July to source information for its Meta AI training. This is similar to OpenAI's GPTBot, which scrapes the web for ChatGPT training data, and prompted many news sites to block the web crawler by adding a robots.txt line of code to its codebase. However, OpenAI and Anthropic were also found to have ignored the robots.txt block rule.