From today's FT Financial Times: Content Daaf1fe5 615d 4f52 90c4 18aac6d542e5
Shares in Google’s parent Alphabet fell by as much as 9 per cent on Wednesday after a top Apple executive said the iPhone maker was “looking at” introducing alternative search engines for its web browser powered by artificial intelligence.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, told a US court that the company was talking to AI start-ups such as Perplexity about offering their search tools as an alternative to Google."
Cue said that Apple planned to “add them to the list” of tools that iPhone and iPad owners can choose to set as their preferred option to search the web through its Safari browser, without giving a timeframe for the potential move.

So apparently Apple is prepared to offer alternative search options, such as AIs, on the iphone.

The only problem with present AIs taking over in search is that their hallucination problem is getting worse and not better, as noted in yesterday's NYT
nytimes.com - AI hallucinations chatgpt google
The content is summarized by the headline
A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse
A new wave of “reasoning” systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don’t know why.

Some (many?) people may like the 'chattiness' of the AI's results, but they may not like it so much once they start realizing it's wrong.
I use different AI engines a lot, for 'deep research', for code generation, etc, and totally agree. If you scratch beyond superficial search, e.g. try a query about something in which you're expert and see what the AI says, I'd very roughly characterize their responses as "garbage 20% of the time". That's purely subjective of course, but in my experience, some substantial fraction of the time the AI screws up. Some of the proposed solutions include agentic AI doing a google search to check facts.
Having just complained about AIs producing garbage some non-trivial part of the time, I should note that some of what AI can do is truly astonishing, as in Nobel Prize level work (Chemistry 2024).

Obviously a complicated, evolving situation, but Google is no slouch in AI itself. I'm betting Google will come out OK. So hodl.