Web Search Portals & Other Information Services NAICS 519290

Nov 11, 2025 - Agentic Search Poses Threat To Industry

• Agentic search, chatbots that summarize information from across the web, could replace traditional search engines as the default gateway to the internet, according to MIT Technology Review. AI agentic search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside. AI search threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy if it becomes the primary portal to the web, according to MIT Technology Review. News Corp, the parent company of media outlets including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity in October 2025 for infringing copyrighted content. News Corp alleges that Perplexity copies news articles, analyses, and opinions "on a massive scale."
• Hacking groups associated with China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and over a dozen other countries have been using Alphabet’s Gemini chatbot to assist with their operations, according to Google’s Threat Intelligence Group. Gemini is helpful in supporting several phases of an attack, including research, creating malicious content, and planning evasion strategies, according to the Threat Intelligence Group, but hackers have not yet been able to use Gemini to generate new attack methods. Hacking groups from Iran and China have used Gemini the most, relying on the chatbot for a wide variety of tasks from researching military targets to malicious scripting. More than 20 Chinese groups and 10 Iranian groups were observed using Gemini.

• Generative AI is ruining vast swaths of the internet with fake content, according to Google researchers. A yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper by the researchers found that the great majority of generative AI users are using the technology to "blur the lines between authenticity and deception" by posting fake or doctored AI content, such as images or videos, on the internet. The problem is being compounded by increasingly advanced and readily available generative AI systems "requiring minimal technical expertise," according to the researchers, and this situation is twisting people's "collective understanding of socio-political reality or scientific consensus."
• Web search portal and other information service industry employment and average wages for nonsupervisory employees increased slightly during the first five months of 2025, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Web search portal and other information service industry sales are forecast to grow at a 3.04% compounded annual rate from 2025 to 2029, slower than the growth of the overall economy, according to Inforum and the Interindustry Economic Research Fund, Inc.