Market leaders have the ability to resist competitive challenges by leveraging their superior infrastructure, preying on people’s fear of change, and further entrenching consumer habits. This is the ‘incumbent’s advantage’. To challenge the market leader, “the longest way around is often the shortest way home”^1. says Liddell Hart, a 20th century military thinker who postulated that competitors who develop uninspired strategies that simply move along the line of natural expectation only serve to consolidate the opponent’s ability to resist. To break Google’s monopoly on the ‘Search engine’ market, OpenAI had to take take the long way around.

Using ‘Key Words’ to conduct an online search are starting to fall by the wayside.  The culprit upsetting the apple cart is OpenAI which is revolutionizing the way we search online and thus the way we interface with the internet.   Rather than requiring ‘key words’ to find what we are looking for, OpenAI (and others) is engaging us in a conversation and in doing so makes Google’s search engine model feel somewhat pedestrian.

As search engines go, Google dominates the market with 90+% share.^2.  Microsoft’s Bing is the closest rival at 4.5% share followed up by Yangdex, Yahoo, Baidu, and Duck Duck Go, all with market shares of approximately 1%.  Google so dominates the search engine market that both the EU and USA are investigating them for operating a monopoly.  So how can one compete?

The predictable, head-on approach is to attack Google directly and build a better search engine as we’ve seen with Bing and others with predictably dismal results. To date, all of Google’s competitors have simply bumped along the line of natural expectation competing directly on Google’s home turf where they are pulverized by Google’s massive infrastructure, brand recognition and, most importantly, entrenched user habits.

OpenAI has taken a different approach opting for the long way around rather than attacking Google and search engines directly.  In late 2022 OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which wasn’t launched as a search engine at all but rather as a conversational AI tool.

The conversational interface of ChatGPT reimagined how people could access information.  Importantly, the initial launch of ChatGPT didn’t openly go after Google.   Instead ChatGPT targeted writing, coding and idea formation as a different way of interfacing with the internet with the goal of changing consumer behavior before directly competing with Google search.  Then, when consumer behaviours started shifting, ChatGPT added a search functionality.^3.  That was in October of 2024 and then just last month, in October 2025, OpenAI launched their own Atlas browser.

OpenAI didn’t attack the traditional web search where Google dominates.  Instead, they redefined what “search” could mean and in doing so potentially made Google’s keyword-based queries obsolete.   Google was expecting a competitor to try to build a better search engine.  They weren’t expecting a competitor that would make their search engine model irrelevant.   By the time OpenAI moved into search, millions of users were already conditioned to ask questions conversationally and thus breaking the “key word” model so integral to Google’s search engine.

How has Google responded to OpenAI’s challenge? Awkwardly. Google is shoehorning AI summaries into their traditional search engine results in an attempt to defend their turf rather than creating a better search experience.  One can only feel that the balance of power is shifting.

What we can learn from OpenAI’s strategy:

• The longest way around can often be the shortest way to success:  Google was expecting competitors to develop better search engines, but they were not expecting a competitor to redefine “how we search”
• Mask your intentions: OpenAI (at least initially) never openly challenged Google.  When they launched in 2022, ChatGPT was promoted as a tool to assist in writing, coding and ideation…not a search engine!
• Change consumer habits:  This is the toughest part of any new product launch. Habits are the incumbent’s most powerful tool of defense.  Challengers must find better ways to entice customers in order to break old habits.

By taking the long way around and redefining how we “search” OpenAI has become the first real challenger to Google’s search engine dominance.  How OpenAI’s challenge to Google turns out, only time will tell.  Now a question for each of you … when developing a new product or service is your strategy simply bumping along the line of natural expectation or do you consider how to bypass the incumbent’s advantage and create new value?