Introduction
No, ChatGPT is not replacing Google, but it is already fundamentally changing how search works and what has traditionally defined user behaviour in search. I don’t believe that ChatGPT will ever truly replace Google, because whilst it has seen significant growth in recent years fueled by a 81% increase in visits to ‘chatbots’, helping them reach 858 million active users, Google is still far outperforming them in pure searches by a ratio of 373:1, retaining a market share of over 93%. In fact, traditional search engine traffic has only declined 0.5% in the last 24 months.
If you’re running Paid Search or SEO for your business/clients, shaping your strategy to flex with market changes should be second nature to you anyway. Search in recent years has grown to evolve from simply search engines to social discovery and brand awareness as a more rounded marketing strategy, and AI simply becomes a part of that.
The scale gap
Comparing Google Search vs ChatGPT directly is not a fair comparison, really, because their uses are not exactly aligned. What we can do is take estimates of prompts with search intent and that shows as you’ll see in the table below, a considerable gap between Google & ChatGPT. What we’re seeing is AI creating a new avenue for itself in most cases and being used alongside traditional search.
Sources
- https://firstpagesage.com/seo-blog/google-vs-chatgpt-market-share-report/
- https://www.sianamarketing.com/resources/chatgpt-usage-by-country-2026
- https://searchengineland.com/google-210x-bigger-chatgpt-search-462604
- https://sqmagazine.co.uk/chatgpt-vs-google-gemini-statistics/
- https://www.advancedwebranking.com/blog/google-vs-chatgpt-who-wins-ai-search-race
For traditional search queries, Sparktoro estimates that ChatGPT is handling fewer searches than not only Google and Bing, but also Yahoo & DuckDuckGo.
Source: sparktoro.com
How ChatGPT is actually being used (It’s not all search)
It’s to simple to look at the user numbers and assume every ChatGPT prompt is something that has been taken from Google, but the data tells a different story. A recent study from Semrush revealed that only around 30% of ChatGPT prompts fall into traditional search-like behaviour.
To understand where the other 70% goes, think about how you use AI in your day to day life and work.. If you’re like most digital professionals, you aren’t using ChatGPT to find a local restaurant or check the news. You’re using it as a tool to help with longer more resource intensive tasks to free up time to work on other things. A good example of this is code debugging. It might take you a day to debug something that AI could potentially do in a few minutes. That means you can move onto the next thing much sooner and improve your workflow.
This difference between informational and commercial intent is where the line is currently drawn.
Think about a problem you might have at home, a leak causing a damp patch, previously you’d head to Google to research and click through numerous websites trying to work out between all of the content which is the issue. Now you can use ChatGPT to research the problem whilst providing it with crucial contextual information like the type of house, where the damp patch is, whether its actively leaking or dripping, the room above it etc. However once the research is done, you probably still need a professional to help fix it. This is where the journey with ChatGPT traditionally ends and you head to Google to search for a local plumber, you’ll read reviews, pricing, get in touch to understand availability, that’s where the conversion happens.
ChatGPT recently launched shopping the US where you can buy things from directly from Shopify websites without leaving the platform. Google Shopping didn’t immediately die in response because not only is there behavioural changes required by users, there’s also a lot of trust that needs to be built with AI before users are fully comfortable with it. This is especially true when a majority of headlines about AI tend to be negative.
AI is capturing some of the research and thinking phase of a conversion journey, but Google still wins the conversion phase, and it’ll be a long time before this changes.
Where AI search IS winning
If you judge the battle purely on “who answers more questions”, AI tools can look surprisingly competitive. Search Engine Land references that even if you treat ChatGPT as a search product, it’s still tiny compared with Google, at roughly 37.5 million search-like prompts per day versus about 14 billion Google searches per day as previously highlighted in the table above. That brings ChatGPT to a lower market share than Bing, Yahoo and even DuckDuckGo with a large gap still to cover before even reaching those.
But AI is winning in the parts of the journey where people want to research, find the right direction, and a have second brain. Some Ahrefs analysis estimated ChatGPT handles around 2.5 billion prompts per day (based on 18 billion messages weekly), and estimates that a meaningful portion of that activity overlaps with things people used to search on Google for. In other words, ChatGPT can remove the “ten blue links” step for tasks like troubleshooting, learning, planning, comparing options, and making sense of a topic before you act.
Where Google still holds the advantage is what happens next: clicks, visits, and conversions. Ahrefs found Google sends 190x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT’s click-through rate is dramatically lower (estimated 96% lower than Google, depending on classification). Unfortunately this can’t be properly verified as ChatGPT doesn’t share this data, it’s all estimated until they do. Search Engine Land has also flagged that even within Google itself, a large share of searches end without a click and this was true even before AI Overviews appeared in over half of all searches. This reinforces the bigger trend, more answers are being consumed on-platform, whether that platform is Google with their AI Overviews or a chatbot. Both of those are going to impact traffic levels because fewer people are coming to your website during the research phase. This is why it’s so important to have a performing strategy for search on commercial terms.
AI Overviews & the search evolution
Something not spoken about enough is that Google was never going to just sit back and watch ChatGPT eat into it’s market share. Their response with AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) is already fundamentally changing the SERPs.
Rather than just building a separate chatbot like they did with Gemini to compete with ChatGPT, Google has also embedded the AI directly into the search results.
For us digital marketers and you as businesses, this is the single biggest shift since the introduction of the smartphone. In practice, this means Google is attempting to satisfy the user’s intent directly on the results page. If a user asks, “How do I fix a leaking radiator?”, Google’s AI Overview now scrapes the top-ranking articles, doing the research for you, combines the steps, and presents the answer immediately. The result? A rise in zero-click searches. A user never has to reach a website to find the answer.
This sounds alarming for SEO, but it’s a necessary evolution for Google. To keep users from defecting to ChatGPT for research tasks, Google must provide that same conversational, all-in-one experience, that in turn keeps the user on Google for when they are ready to move into more commercial intent searches.
Furthermore, Google is integrating its Gemini model across its entire ecosystem with Workspace, Android, and Chrome. Unlike ChatGPT, which sits as a destination you have to visit, Google’s AI is embedded into the software and tools that you already use.
So, while ChatGPT is winning specific “deep work” sessions, Google is fighting to keep their audience by ensuring that for the vast majority of, the best AI answers are still found right where users are used to going already, Google Search.
What this means for your SEO & paid search strategy
If you’re deciding where to place budget and effort, the key point is that Google is still the main commercial channel and that hasn’t changed yet, even as AI eats into the research phase. From a commercial performance perspective, it’s not just volume, it’s referral power. Ahrefs estimates that Google sends 190x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT’s click-through rate is around 96% lower than Google’s, largely because users get answers inside the chat rather than clicking out. AI can influence consideration which is why it’s important your content strategy supports this part of the journey,, but Google still dominates the true conversion moments.
What does that mean for your strategy?
- Keep investing in Google Search (SEO + Google Ads) for high-intent queries because the scale and share are still very much there.
- Expand your coverage on Bing where it makes sense; Bing remains materially larger than ChatGPT in search share terms. Bing also powers ChatGPT web searches. It’s an easy win to diversify your online coverage and start prepping for optimising in ChatGPT.
- Build content that’s easy for AI systems to reference. You need clean headings, short direct answers, strong entity signals, and genuinely helpful comparison or how to sections. This supports both of your classic rankings and AI-driven summaries. You’re halfway there already!
- Start measuring AI referrals properly in your reporting. Break out sources like ChatGPT in GA4, track landing pages they hit, and compare assisted conversion behaviour against organic and paid search. But also make sure you’re looking at how AI is appearing throughout the conversion journey where possible, was AI the first touch point on your website, or the last?
The 2026–2030 Outlook
The direction of AI vs Search is consistent across different studies, but they cary wildly in impact. Gartner’s widely cited prediction says by the end of 2026, up to 25% of traditional search volume will shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents, but they don’t segment this into commercial/information searches. By 2028 they are projecting that organic search traffic could be down by 50% or more as consumers embed generative AI into their everyday routines.
Looking further ahead, industry analyst Kevin Indig’s modelling (using Similarweb traffic data) predicts that ChatGPT’s traffic could surpass Google’s by around October 2030, with LLM-powered systems collectively commanding over 50% of global search query volume by that point. That said, these projections require AI platforms to maintain their current double-digit monthly growth rates which is unlikely.
One of the biggest changes on the horizon is Apple and how it integrates AI into iPhones, iPads and Macs. They are certainly not the first to bring AI to the masses, but Apple excels in doing things in a way that simplify the process for users and make it more natural. They’ve partnered with Google to use the Gemini models for a new version of Safari (but only the models, they’re using private compute to run them and keep your data private).
It’s not time to panic, it’s time to prepare.. Start adapting your content and measurement strategies now and you’ll be one of the ones in the strongest position when the tipping point eventually arrives, be it in two years or ten years.
Conclusion
Right now, ChatGPT is not replacing Google, at least not in the way that some influencers on LinkedIn would have you believe with their ‘SEO IS DEAD’ posts.
Google still handles 14 billion searches per day and holds 93% of global search market share. ChatGPT is growing rapidly and capturing the research, discovery, and “deep thinking” phases of the user journey. But when someone is ready to buy, book, or contact a business, they are still overwhelmingly heading to Google.
The smarter question for any business investing in digital marketing isn’t “should we abandon Google?”, it’s “are we building content that works in both worlds?”
That means writing for answers, not just keywords. It means structuring your pages so that both Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity can cite you accurately. And it means having the tracking in place, particularly in GA4, as ChatGPT doesn’t have any analytics, and this will allow you to actually see which AI tools are already sending traffic to your site, so you’re making decisions based on data rather than noise.
The search landscape is shifting. The businesses that treat this moment as a prompt to evolve, much like we have in the past, rather than a reason to worry will be the ones still growing when the dust settles. It’s a drum we at Embryo have been banging for 2+ years now.
If you want to understand how AI search trends are affecting your organic or paid performance? Our team can audit your current visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search. Get in touch today.
