Apple wants to add AI search engines to Safari as Google usage begins to drop

Apple is planning to integrate third-party AI search providers such as Perplexity and Anthropic in its Safari browser. The news comes straight from the company's Senior Vice President, Eddy Cue.

Cue testified in court as part of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Apple earns an estimated $20 billion-a-year from Google, just for enabling the latter's search engine as the default in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

Recent reports had revealed that Microsoft Bing had gained a small chunk of users, while Google's own numbers had dropped. Cue told the court that web searches on Apple Safari had dropped for the first time ever in April 2025. He attributed the change to the rise of AI search providers like OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Anthropic, etc. Cue says that Apple will be adding those options to Safari.

Apple has already partnered with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT as an option via Siri in iOS 18. The company is reported to be working on adding Gemini support. However, he stated these AI search providers won't be the default option. Bloomberg quotes Cue as saying that Apple has already held discussions with Perplexity. Apple was also interested in China's DeepSeek, xAI's Grok, Anthropic, but seems to have opted for Perplexity's service.

Cue also confirmed that discussions with Google had failed last year, because the Alphabet-owned company's term sheet had a lot of things that Apple wouldn't agree to. This resulted in OpenAI being chosen as the partner to be integrated into Apple Intelligence. Cue believes that AI services need to improve, and enhance their search indexes, but also said that the other features offered by AI services are making people switch to them quickly.

Google has published a statement on its website that denied that its search usage is dropping, and that it's numbers were actually increasing.

AI-powered search services could impact the entire search engine industry greatly, and in turn Apple's own ecosystem as well.

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