Google Wants to Move Away from Apple’s Safari, Says Report

Google is looking to decrease its dependence on Apple’s Safari browser for search traffic from iPhones amidst an ongoing U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) probe into the tech giant’s dominance in the search engine industry — reports The Information (via 9to5Mac).

One part of the case against Google focuses on its revenue-sharing deal with Apple to be the default search engine on iPhones. Google pays Apple over $20 billion annually for this privilege, which the DOJ argues limits competition in search engines.

Under their agreement, Google pays Apple a cut of advertising revenue from Google searches made through Safari. While Apple itself isn’t part of the lawsuit, company executives like Eddy Cue have been called on to testify. The Justice Department’s antitrust ruling could threaten this deal.

“For several years, Google has been trying to protect itself against that possibility by trying to persuade iPhone owners to switch to either the Google or Chrome apps for their searches,” The Information said in its report. “While Google has made headway—lifting the percentage of searches done that way to the low 30s from 25% five years ago—that progress stalled in the second half of last year.”

Diverting search traffic from Safari to its own apps would not only allow Google to pay Apple less money but also help stave off antitrust concerns and threats of regulation. However, getting users to switch from using Safari to Google and Chrome is a taller task than the company anticipated. “It’s simply too hard to overcome the fact that Safari is preinstalled on Apple devices,” sources told The Information.

What’s more, Google’s slow progress in these efforts casts doubt over the feasibility of the company’s plans to increase the number of iPhone searches made through its own apps to 50% by 2030, which insiders who have worked on the project told The Information about.

Earlier this year, Google hired former Instagram and Yahoo executive Robby Stein to spearhead its campaign to incentivize iOS users to initiate searches through Google apps. To that end, the search giant even considered withholding its AI Overviews feature from Safari. AI Overviews provide users with AI-generated responses to search queries.

The decision would have made it so AI Overviews weren’t available in search results on Safari, but users performing searches through Google and Chrome would have been able to see them. However, Google ultimately scrapped these plans.

As Google struggles to wrangle iOS search share away from Safari, it remains to be seen how the DOJ probe will affect its deal with Apple. According to today’s report, a decision in the antitrust case is expected “sometime in the next few months.”