Microsoft Is Trying to Trick You Into Using Copilot
There are a lot of AI products to choose from these days, but it’s pretty clear who the big players are. There’s Google’s Gemini, with 400 million monthly users , which might seem like a lot until you realize that ChatGPT attracts 700 million users each week . That doesn’t really compare to even Microsoft, whose AI assistant Copilot attracts a modest 20 million users per week . That’s a lot of people, mind you, but if you work at Microsoft, you might be thinking about how to steal some of that traffic from OpenAI and Google, even though Microsoft is a major OpenAI partner .
That’s exactly what Microsoft appears to be doing. If you use Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you’ll find a variety of different options for interacting with Copilot. You can click the big Copilot button next to the search bar, or use the huge “Copilot Answer” that appears at the top of any search result, like the one in the AI Reviews section . But if you try to use Bing to search for another AI product, like ChatGPT or Gemini, the Copilot answer will be replaced by something else entirely: Copilot itself.
Bing’s Copilot Trick
Try it. If Microsoft hasn’t updated Bing since this article was published, searching for one of these AI competitors will yield this result: You’ll see a message that says “Microsoft Promotion: Your Copilot is Here,” urging you to “easily ask questions, create images, and get things done with Copilot, your trusted assistant.” Below that is a large, clickable search bar that says “Ask me anything.” Indeed, you can type a query into that box, click it, and be taken to a new Copilot window. (Interestingly, searching for Anthropic or its AI product Claude doesn’t launch Copilot. Sorry, Anthropic.)
You see, Bing is a Microsoft product, so of course the company would rather direct you to its own services than to what you’re actually looking for. It’s essentially the same thing when you search Bing for a third-party web browser like Chrome: Bing’s first “result” is an invitation to “try Microsoft’s latest browser,” with a handy link to launch Edge. However, I think this last tactic blurs the line between encouragement and deception a bit. I think if you’re looking for one web browser and Microsoft offers you a link to another, it’s pretty obvious that you’re choosing between the two. But I can see why someone searching for ChatGPT in Bing might be confused by the immediate search bar encouraging them to get started right away, especially if they don’t know what Copilot is.
This is becoming a trend, Microsoft.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has tried to trick people into using its products. Earlier this year , the company spoofed Google’s home page every time someone used Bing to search for Google. To the untrained eye, it might seem like you’ve already landed on Google, as the top half of the window looks a lot like the iconic search engine. Only by looking at the bottom half does it become clear that it’s still a search result on Bing’s site, not Google. How many people have been tricked into using Bing into thinking that’s what they’re looking for?
Fast forward to August, and I wonder how many people will be using Copilot thinking they’ve gotten to ChatGPT or Gemini. In my humble opinion, if you’re going to build a search engine, it should primarily direct users to the content they want. Using a search engine as a tool to trick users into using your other services is unfair and, frankly, sad.