Generative AI is getting more mature—and users are becoming less impressed by the mere existence of a chatbot. New data from content performance firm BrightEdge shows that Perplexity’s AI chatbots are losing ground to Google’s Gemini, which has surpassed Perplexity in terms of use. From a market share standpoint, Perplexity lost 13.4% of its market share in December—while Gemini expanded its market share by 38.18%.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu calls this phenomenon AI Darwinism: Consumers are beginning to figure out what they want from an AI chatbot and search, and they’re becoming loyal to their preferred sources. It’s natural selection in an inherently unnatural environment. But, just as we learned about evolution in school, tomorrow’s AI search winners will have to triumph in a survival-of-the-fittest sort of challenge.

In the case of Google vs. Perplexity, Yu said the search behemoth is winning on multiple fronts. First is technical: November’s launch of Gemini 3 was hailed as a huge leap in capability, speed and accuracy. But that’s not Google’s only move here. Yu pointed out that Google added a Gemini AI search button to its already-dominant search engine. It’s expanded AI Overviews of traditional search results. And Gemini will soon be powering Apple’s Siri.

“It is both the innovation and the core product, with their AI getting better and better, but also the distribution that they have across all these different places, where they really can get the consumers comfortable with their AI,” Yu said. “We see this really interesting dynamic in the data where Google’s dominance is now really resurging.”

Google is unequivocally the biggest in many realms of online business and infrastructure, but in terms of AI, are they the “fittest”? Yu says that is yet to be seen. Yes, more people are using Gemini, but ChatGPT remains quite powerful. OpenAI’s chatbot is still what most average users associate with generative AI, and Yu said its chatbot has a 15x greater referral rate than Gemini’s. And OpenAI’s advertising proposal—which could provide deep and useful targeted information—might deepen how well the chatbot is used.

But no matter which AI company is in the lead, Yu said what marketers need to do isn’t changing: Make sure your brand’s content can easily be found and understood, so AI search engines—and increasingly AI agents—can bring the user to you.

While marketers’ work does run on numbers, the more speculative and predictive nature of what you do sometimes puts you at odds with the CFO and finance department. In precarious economic times, it makes sense for all departments to more tightly align—though B2B marketing firm 2X’s CFO Brandon Sullivan says the CMO-CFO partnership should always be strong. I talked to him about how these two departments can better work together. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

TikTok is now an American company. After the 14-hour TikTok blackout last January and the Trump Administration’s scramble to find U.S.-friendly ownership to keep people here entertained with a steady stream of short-form videos, the deal became final last week. A group of Trump-approved investors now control the U.S. unit of the social video app. Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX are the managing investors of the American TikTok business, with each holding a 15% stake in the company, and Oracle managing U.S. user data. It will operate independently, and the CEO will be Adam Presser, previously TikTok’s head of operations and trust and safety.

However, ever since the deal was finalized, there have been many complaints about what some say is a more Trump-friendly governance structure for posts on the app. Several politicians, celebrities and influencers have reported posts they’ve made that are critical of Trump’s policies—including the controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis and the killing of nonviolent protester Alex Pretti—have garnered far fewer views than their other........

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