I suspect that bard.google.com will continue to be a free service. Notably: Google Maps are more research and data intensive than bard.

Consider Bard. You enter a prompt. Bard then summarizes pages that it scraped off the Internet.

It is pretty much the same thing as Google Search ... except that it doesn't provide any free links to web sites.

I suspect that Alphabet fears that chatGPT might become a competitor to its search engine. Many of the companies developing AIs have their eyes on the search engine market.

I suspect that the management of Alphabet understand that they have to have a free AI text generator to continue their dominance in search.

!WINEX