Is ChatGPT really killing Google?
Image: Supplied
Shira Ovide
There are regular headlines suggesting chatbots like ChatGPT may be taking over for Googling. Maybe you've also started using artificial intelligence instead of Google to hunt for hiking boots, news about flooding in Texas or Roblox game tips.
To separate truth from belief, I dug into the numbers. What I found was that our use of chatbots is growing fast but that Google search still overwhelmingly remains our front door to find online news, information and products. Sorry, AI bros.
Web search may be losing some ground to AI, but we rely on it so much that chatbots are barely making a dent. The data suggests that Google has nearly 400 times the usage of ChatGPT for some news and information.
Chatbots for news
Similarweb, which studies our website activity, said last month that ChatGPT is a massively fast-growing way that Americans are finding online news articles.
About 25 million times from January through May this year, we landed on a news website after clicking a link in ChatGPT - up from just about 1 million times a year earlier, according to Similarweb. Wow.
(The Washington Post has a content partnership with ChatGPT owner OpenAI.)
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But in the same five months, Americans landed on news websites about 9.5 billion times from using web search engines including Google and clicking on a link, Similarweb's director of market insights, Laurie Naspe, confirmed.
Put another way, for every American who asked ChatGPT for information and landed on a news website to learn more, 379 people used Google to do the same thing.
Important caveats: We behave differently when using chatbots for information compared with web search engines.
Chatbots (including the 'AI Overviews' in Google search) paraphrase information from news articles about Samsung's latest smartphone or online reviews of air purifiers. You might rarely click a web link to find out more, as you do with conventional Google searches.
That behavior is causing carnage for websites and alters the Similarweb numbers. When we use ChatGPT to summarize news events and stop there, it doesn't show up in Similarweb's web click data.
However you interpret the numbers, Google remains for now a dominant way Americans find news websites.
The percentage of website visits to search vs AI sites
Image: The Washington Post
Chatbots vs search
A different report, by web analysis firm Datos by Semrush and software company SparkToro, found that about 11 out of every 100 of our website visits from a computer is to Google and other search engines. AI technologies - including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and more - account for less than 1 out of every 100 websites we visit combined.
The report shows a huge increase in the amount of web visits to chatbot sites in the past year, but we're still using search websites many times more.
'Search is one of the most popular and fastest-growing features in ChatGPT,' an OpenAI spokesperson said. 'We're investing in a faster, smarter search experience and remain committed to helping people discover high-quality news and information.'
Google said it generally doesn't comment about its market share.
SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin did some related number crunching and found that chatbots were even punier compared with search.
He made educated assumptions to compare how often we're using ChatGPT to find the kinds of information for which we've typically used Google, such as learning about the Golden Gate Bridge or comparing options for an air conditioner.
Fishkin found that we're doing more than 14 billion Google searches a day compared with at most 37.5 million Google-like searches on ChatGPT. Google, in other words, has about 373 times the comparable usage of ChatGPT.
Important caveat: Fishkin's educated guesses are just one data point. Fishkin also wasn't counting our use of chatbots for tasks we don't do in search, such as summarizing a long report or writing a bedtime story. And some of our time with Google search is now with its AI Overviews and AI Mode, though it's hard to measure how much.
There have been other imperfect but useful analyses that have suggested we're doing more Google searches and using chatbots more, too. At least hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT each week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in April. While the numbers aren't comparable, Google's web search has nearly 5 billion users.
So are chatbots killing Google search?
The answer, like our habits, isn't that simple.
In my conversations with people who oversee websites, some of them said they are overhauling their strategy to attract readers and viewers like you, because they believe fewer people will find them from web search links and more from chatbots. Your favorite websites are willingly or grudgingly adapting to chatbots that might kill them anyway.
It can also be true that we constantly misjudge how fast new technology is replacing our old habits.
It might feel as if people buy everything online, but e-commerce accounts for just 16 percent of all the stuff that Americans buy. Until very recently, Americans still spent more time watching conventional cable or free television than streaming on TVs, according to Nielsen.
And for now, the use of ChatGPT for news and other information remains puny.
'When everyone else is talking about it and the media's writing about it, a new technology can feel far bigger than it is,' Fishkin said. | The Washington Post
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