Shares of Alphabet ( GOOGL -1.02%) ( GOOG -0.92%) sank after Apple executive Eddy Cue said that searches on Safari declined for the first time ever in April. Cue attributed the decline to people using more artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots and predicted that AI search engines will eventually replace traditional search.

Google has been worrying about losing search share to AI engines like ChatGPT for a couple of years.

Now, even Apple is signaling a shift toward AI search — and away from Google. Due to the dominance of Apple iPhones, Apple's approach to search will have much wider impacts acro