Given that this was announced only minutes before Microsoft announced the event tomorrow where they're expected to unveil the new GPT-powered Bing, they are probably scared of that rather than ChatGPT. I know Bing is a joke right now, but if it suddenly becomes a far better information assistant than Google simply by virtue of its ability to chat about search results and keep the context, that poses a huge threat (if the new Bing goes viral like ChatGPT did).

But it doesn't sound like Bard is going to be linked to the Google search engine just yet. The article mentions separate AI search integrations coming soon, but from the screenshots it just seems to generate a paragraph or two about the search, without citations.