The rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has sparked talk of a new model of search in which artificial intelligence delivers decisive answers, rather than the page of links popularized by Google. But the biggest challenge for companies hoping to capitalize on that idea has been a lack of data — the kind that Google amassed through decades of running the internet’s dominant search engine. 

Enter the US Justice Department, which last month proposed major changes to Google after a federal judge’s landmark ruling that the tech giant illegally monopolized online search. The DOJ’s proposed remedies include a forced sale of Google’s Chrome browser and a provision forcing the tech giant to make the data it uses to generate search results available to rivals. Together, those two steps could upend search.