Stung by the blow he received from a Apple Privacy Feature three years ago, Meta was reportedly looking to reduce its dependence on Google and Microsoft. The information said On Monday, Meta is developing a search engine for its chatbot. The company also recently in partnership with Reuters to help its AI answer questions related to current events.

Meta has reportedly been working on web indexing for at least eight months. The company’s goal would be to integrate the indexes into Meta AI, giving the chatbot an alternative to Google Search and Microsoft Bing. Meta publicly disclosed its website crawler technology this summer, saying only that it was intended to “train AI models or improve products” without outright stating that it was building a search backend. Senior Director of Engineering Xueyuan Su would lead the search engine project.

The information claims that this move is a direct result of reliance on other large tech companies that have “bitten” the company in the past, such as Apple’s Application Tracking Transparency (ATT). Meta previously said iPhone privacy feature introduced in 2021 would cost more than $10 billion in lost ad revenue. (He was so concerned about functionality that it was prosecuted for allegedly avoiding its rules.)

The idea is that CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants Meta to be as autonomous as possible to prevent this from happening again if Google or Microsoft were to cut off its access to web searches. It is unclear whether Meta is currently paying either company for this access.

Engadget has contacted Meta for comment. We will update this story if we receive a response.

The company’s investments in AI appear to be paying off. Zuckerberg posted on Threads in August that Meta AI had more than 185 million weekly active users and more than 400 million monthly. “It’s growing fast, and we haven’t even rolled out our product to the UK, Brazil or the European Union yet,” the Facebook founder wrote. OpenAI said earlier this month that ChatGPT had 250 million weekly users.

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