OpenAI's technological integration with Microsoft's Bing has led to a rise in user traffic to the largely underutilised search engine, enabling it to better match Google's supremacy in page visit growth, as per Similarweb's analytics statistics.

Page views on Bing have climbed by 15.8%, according to statistics collected through March 20th, after Microsoft launched its AI-powered version on February 7th. Page views on Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., on the other hand, have declined by over 1% within the same time frame.

The capabilities of the technology that underpins ChatGPT, the well-known chatbot that has been likened by some experts to the "iPhone moment" for the field of AI, show Microsoft to have an early advantage over Google in its quickly-evolving race for dominance in generative AI.

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These numbers also show a rather unusual opportunity for Microsoft to gain momentum in the over $120 billion search business, which Google has long controlled with a market share of more than 80%.

Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co., predicts that Bing will certainly gain market share in the coming months, particularly if Google continues to delay the incorporation of generative AI into its products.

Although the majority of people across the world have had access to Bing's AI since February, Google's chatbot, Bard, has just recently begun to be made available to the general public.

As Bing has less than a tenth of Google's market share, Luria said that even a conversion rate of 1% to 2% would considerably benefit both Bing and Microsoft.

An app research business named Data.ai said that when AI technology was implemented, app downloads for Bing increased eightfold globally. In comparison, downloads for the Google search app declined by two per cent during the same time, as per the statistics.

A few observers think that Google, which ousted Yahoo as the leading search engine in the early 2000s, might overcome its first difficulties and maintain its dominant position despite Microsoft's recent successes in the search industry.

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According to Yongjei Jeong, an analyst at Mirae Asset Securities in South Korea, "Google's ranking algorithm can have a competitive edge over those of competitors," pointing to how Google's algorithm helped it defeat Yahoo Search.