After Google Search: could Mozilla switch Firefox to AI search?
Mozilla is in predicament currently. The organization that is behind the Firefox web browser makes most of its revenue from a search deal with Google. The advertising giant pays Mozilla hundreds of million of Dollar each year to stay the default search engine for hundreds of million of Firefox users.
This search deal, along with Google's search deal with Apple, is now part of a major legal battle in the United States. While Google could face a break up of the company in the worst case, with Chrome one of the top applications to be split from Google, Mozilla could also find itself on the receiving end.
There is the possibility that Google is blocked by the court from making further agreements with third-parties to make Google Search the default. Mozilla, in that case, would have to find a replacement.
Problem is, there are not that many, at least not when you look just at traditional search engines. Microsoft with its Bing search engine is likely the only company with enough resources to make a deal with Mozilla. It would mean less money, likely, as Microsoft bid less than Google in the past already. With Google out, Microsoft would not have to worry too much about that anymore.
AI Search is rising
Traditional search engines like Google Search or Bing, existed for decades without much competition. If you wanted to look up information, you fired up Google or Bing, typed in a question, phrase, or word, and browsed the resulting webpages to hopefully find the information. Or, if you started your search from a browser, you would simply type in the address bar to redirect the prompt to the default search engine or another one installed in the browser.
The rise of AI and AI-based search threatens the traditional search model. Broken down to the core, this new type of search does not return a list of webpages ranked by secretive algorithms. These new search engines return information as text. The data comes from billions of websites and the sites do get a link if they are cited, but the searcher gets a direct response to the search query.
AI based search engines threaten the organic search model. They could capture a large percentage of the search market in the coming years, which threatens Google's main business model, but could also lead to new opportunities for organizations like Mozilla.
Mozilla did, in fact, test the integration of Perplexit AI search in Firefox recently. Apple revealed plans to integrate AI search engines into Safari as well this month.
Mozilla could, in theory at least, broker a deal with an AI search engine to replace Google Search. Most AI based search companies may not have sufficient financial resources to broker such a deal, but major organizations, like OpenAI or Perplexity, might.
The global AI search market is expected to reach 108 billion USD by 2032 according to an industry report by Coherent Market Insights.
Such a change would change search fundamentally in the browser. It would also raise questions, especially about privacy and transparency. Mozilla would need to take these into account to avoid severe backlash from the community.
Closing Words
Mozilla continues to diversify its income streams, but even though it has made progress in the past couple of years, more than 80 percent of revenue still comes from its search engine deal with Google.
Mozilla is trying out new options. The Perplexity test in Firefox shows that. Users remained in control, as Mozilla did display a prompt that they could simply dismiss if they had no interest in trying out the AI based search engine. Firefox users have options to set a custom search engine as well.
Now You: what would you suggest Mozilla should do if Google is prevented from renewing the search deal with the organization? Are AI based search engines an option? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
“It would also raise questions, especially about privacy and transparency. Mozilla would need to take these into account to avoid severe backlash from the community.”
Every time Mozilla backstabs even after the thousandth time it’s always the same song. It’s publicized like it’s the first time or at least unusual and surely this won’t go unpunished because users would never let that happen.
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Oh here we go again, everyone has to have the latest and most advanced right ? Please be careful where marketing ploys are concerned, because its very possible that the implementation of AI in every case, may not be genuine. Advanced algorithms, yes, but not true AI. I’ve seen so called AI products which are nothing of the sort, especially when the technology is in its infancy, and being sold to the ignorant mass of consumers in the world today.
The top developments in AI, are not going to be available to the ordinary consumer, the top developments will be used to make enormous amounts of money, the military for example. What the consumer gets are the bargain basement benefits, presented to appeal, and through deception, generates considerable revenue streams for dishonest people.
Don’t take their word for it, do your research, and believe it when you see it, not because they say so. Don’t take everything on face value.
Peter Newton [London UK] (Linux user since 2004)
View this from the standpoint of website owners, like the one you’re on now.
Search for something that this site explains or let’s you know is happening.
That’s in an AI summary at the top of the search results. You read it and got your answer. This site gets zero visits and zero income.
That should scare you…it certainly scares website owners.
Reminds me the time when Amazon started to overtake Shopping Malls. Not exactly the same situation, but early familiar.
I noticed that I am using AI more and more for search. But for now I avoid medical topics in AI searches and double check searches on more politically charged topics if I smell something fishy.
If pretty much nobody cares about Mozilla or what Mozilla does, how can they survive? they are just dying, and they will die without Google’s money because nobody will just give a free check like Google did for whatever reason.
It’s stupid to think Governments can tell you to ‘split’ and all that, Google as garbage as it is, it is important for the web, and only because users and developers chose Chromium by their own decision, doesn’t mean anyone should tell them to split only because they are popular.
Google search deal with or without the untouchable kings and queens of the government, who pull laws out of their butt and don’t do what their constitutions says, was going to finish Mozilla’s search deal soon, so Mozilla had to look for a plan B since years ago and they never did.
Now it is too late, so regardless what Mozilla does and releases, nobody really cares, so how can a company survive only because of ‘AI’ or something like an ‘ad network’, if people are just using it less and less?
The problem is how do you ensure that the AI search results are legitimate. As per this Guardian news site article this morning Chatbots are easily manipulated to churn out all sort of junk results which in turn, could be used by a browser AI search tool: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/21/most-ai-chatbots-easily-tricked-into-giving-dangerous-responses-study-finds
Businesses are jumping on the the AI bandwagon all too quickly in my opinion and more research needs to be done before investing in a technology which might not provide the desired results.
I don’t believe the human race is qualified to teach ai right from wrong so I’m pretty much against all AI.
“Everything you create you use to destroy.” – Leeloo
The human race has centuries of evidence that shows it can teach right from wrong.
Tech Bros worth billions of dollars however don’t care about ethics, the law, or anything that gets in the way of more money. They have no monetary incentive to do the right thing. In fact, ethical AI would be vastly less profitable.
Facts hurt.
If Mozilla really were a non-profit organisation looking to keep the web free and open, they could support the EU-backed OpenWebSearch initiative right?
https://openwebsearch.eu/
Afterall, what happened to all the donation money people have given them and the hundreds of millions of dollars Mozilla have banked from Google each year? Surely with all that money banked and invested, that should keep them going for a long time and allow them to concentrate on their core mission as a non-profit organisation.
That would be a better match than Perplexity – a company who’s CEO said they wanted to build their own browser so they could collect data on everything people do outside of their own AI app, in order to profile them and serve hyper-personalized advertisements.
Not to mention that AI is predominantly a bullshit generator with no way for users to know what’s factual and what it has just made up; an unsolvable problem because there is nothing intelligent about AI, it’s just a statistical machine.
@ECJ
I did not know about openwebsearch.eu. But I do not believe that “Free, open and unbiased access to information” has anything to do with “European values and jurisdiction”.
There has been some relative good from the EU compared to US like the GDPR or funding for local translation tools like the one Mozilla (got for free and) integrated into Firefox. But it can be mostly traced back to european surveillance capitalism often being behind US big tech, for instance in search engines, so like lots of small competitors to US giants (including those small competitors based in US) they advertise on sometimes being less unethical. But the EU jurisdiction itself is nevertheless already forbidding “free, open and unbiaised access to information” for reactionary reasons so this specific project is already meaningless especially if boasting about complying with EU law independently of if it would actually be enforced on them.
Exactly, said could not have said it better.
Not everyone embraces AI and frankly right now AI search isn’t that much better than traditional search. There is a opportunity to go rogue and offer a non-AI search instead. Already we see from users some pushback about AI taking over everything. I don’t find AI a bad thing but I also do not want it in everything. Or I want a option to opt out of some of it.
AI search should definitely be on demand, not default. I keep bookmarks of AI websites If I need to use one. The only one built-in AI in my case is Leo AI that is build in Brave side panel (can not be removed or disabled). I use it almost exclusively to summarize User Agreements (EULA). I almost never use Google, but when I do, I hide Google AI snippets with extension.
A few days ago, How-to-Geek published an excellent article about search engines:
“6 Google Search Alternatives That Protect Your Privacy”- which I found to be very informative.
You might want to take a look.
https://www.howtogeek.com/google-search-alternatives-that-protect-your-privacy/
Of these six, except maybe Mojeek that I would have to look at more, only SearX is ethical and designed for user interests in mind only, the others are surveillance capitalists that monetize search terms for ads and censor/manipulate results. The problem with SearX being of course that it’s a meta-search engine and inherits the manipulation problems of its sources, but at least they can be varied and chosen. And another big problem is that those sources often block temporarily the searx servers, which could be solved with some browser extension that would switch to working searx instances.
Search engines will go out in the next 5 years or so.Microsoft Google and Apple all getting prepared for AI only search. If Mozilla had any brains they too should go all on AI. This will be the future..already is starting up to be.
@SkyNet, if your assertion is true, maybe is it for major search engines; not sure less known engines such as eTools Metasearch, Mojeek, SearXNG Metasearch, Marginalia, Stract, Wiby to name a few, ever will, anyway for those of them which have their own web crawlers.
Remains to be seen if your assertion proves to be more than an hypothesis.
> What would you suggest Mozilla should do if Google is prevented from renewing the search deal with the organization?
Find the most lucrative partnership… given the user remains able to choose (and create with the help of dedicated extensions as it is now). To illustrate my position, I don’t care if my wife spends afternoons chatting with her lady friends as long as I’m not obliged to participate :)
> Are AI based search engines an option?
Why not, as long as, similarly to above, the user remains the captain of his ship. If the question implicitly includes my interest for AI search engines, the answer, at this time, is no. No, at least not if AI sources are not displayed : being able to jump to a page which has been digested by an AI is for me absolutely required.
AI search is better than normal search because it gives more useful information in less time.
More is one thing, better is another. Digesting information from several sources (which ones, when a traditional search may lead to millions results?), and extracting + summarizing the valuable substance based on what criteria? Of course basic queries (pop musicians of the eighties, e.g.) may be summarized by an AI, but what about sophisticated searches which may require the natural time, reasoning, serializing, comparing of a user’s specific brains, all focusing on what the user may have but partially and maybe incorrectly stated in the very corpus of his true search query : “We express ourselves with words but think in space” wrote French philosopher Henri Bergson
We want it big and we want it fast, that’s why we love AI? If so, this is the very condition to lose control of ourselves. Quality has always required time and efforts; passing this to an AI is the abandon of our mental sovereignty. Students would spend hours, days, weeks in libraries, some still do, others just ask AI … Good Lord.