Overview of Search, AI/LLM and Maps Providers

Which ones are "original", which ones just front-ends?

Published: February 2026

Almost everything we use to access knowledge and information - such as web search, AI chats, and maps - is dominated by a few giant companies and a large number of smaller competitors. But not every service uses their own data and technology, many are a front-end for other providers.

The below tables are a quick overview which technologies and data source are used, for example which search index powers the search results of a search engine, which Large Language Model (LLM) family powers the various AI chatbots that have recently popped up, and which map providers are there. For example, Google, Bing, and Brave Search use their own search index, while DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Yahoo are just regurgitating other providers' search results. Likewise, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, Google's Gemini, Meta AI's Llama, and Mistral's Le Chat run their own LLM families, while others, including big names like Microsoft Copilot or Perplexity, rely on these models rather than creating their own.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all providers and I also don't intend to make this into a larger, more complicated comparison table like some of the others on this website.

Selected Search Engines

Selected AI Providers

Selected Map Providers