Case Study Google vs ChatGPT: The Real Story and Insider Insights for Search Dominance in 2025
Google’s Search Growth Defies the AI Hype, but that is only Half of the Story
by Carsten Krause, Chief Editor, The CDO TIMES, July 28th 2025
The SparkToro Findings Surprised Everyone: In mid-2024, SparkToro, part of SemRush, released eye-opening research suggesting that Google’s search engine isn’t just holding its ground against the AI chatbot wave – it’s thriving. According to SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin, Google Search volume grew over 20% in 2024, a remarkable feat for a mature product (Source: sparktoro.com). In raw numbers, Google itself disclosed it handled more than 5 trillion searches in 2024 – roughly 14 billion searches each day. By SparkToro’s estimates, that’s 21.6% year-over-year growth in search querie. Far from being cannibalized by AI, Google saw increased usage, a trend even Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai hinted at when he noted that new AI search features were “encouraged [by] an increase in search usage” among those testing them.
Perhaps the most striking claim from SparkToro was the sheer gap between Google and the buzzy newcomer ChatGPT. In 2024, Google reportedly fielded 373 times more searches than ChatGPT. Put another way, OpenAI’s ChatGPT – the poster child for AI search disruption – accounted for only about 0.25% of search volume versus Google’s 93.5% share (source: searchengineland.com). SparkToro even likened ChatGPT’s daily “search-like” prompts (around 37.5 million) to the scale of Pinterest’s search queries (~20 million/day), and only about one-third of privacy-focused DuckDuckGo’s (~108 million/day).
In short, by SparkToro’s math, ChatGPT in 2024 was a rounding error in search market share, eclipsed not just by Google but even by second-tier engines like Bing and Yahoo.
These findings landed amid rampant speculation that AI chatbots were siphoning users from traditional search. Yet SparkToro’s data implies the opposite: Google’s search business grew despite the AI frenzysparktoro.comsearchengineland.com. This runs counter to the “Google killer” narrative that took hold when ChatGPT’s popularity exploded. However, before declaring the search wars settled, it’s important to scrutinize how SparkToro arrived at these numbers – and whether they tell the full story.
Crunching the Numbers: Google vs. ChatGPT by the Metrics
Figure: Daily search queries in 2024 – Google dwarfs all others. Google averaged ~14 billion searches per day, compared to ~613 million for Bing, ~202 million for Yahoo, ~108 million for DuckDuckGo, and an estimated ~37.5 million for ChatGPT (sources: sparktoro.comsearchengineland.com).
SparkToro’s analysis pulled together disparate data sources to compare Google and ChatGPT on an apples-to-apples basis. First, Google’s side of the equation was informed by the company’s own disclosure of “more than 5 trillion searches in 2024”. That figure – roughly 14 billion a day – aligns with clickstream panel studies that SparkToro and analytics firm Datos used to verify Google’s volume. In fact, StatCounter’s third-party tracking shows Google maintains about 91–93% of global search engine market share in 2024 (source: keywordseverywhere.com). For context, Google’s flagship site received on the order of 84–105 billion visits per month in 2023–2025, dwarfing all other websites (source: semrush.com). Users spent an average of 12–13 minutes per session on Google.com, often rapidly clicking through multiple results (5+ pages per visit on average) in search of answers.
Measuring ChatGPT against this backdrop is trickier – it’s not a traditional search engine, and OpenAI hasn’t published “query” totals in the same way Google has. SparkToro therefore used a bit of algebra and external studies to derive ChatGPT’s “search-equivalent” usage. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed in late 2023 that ChatGPT was handling about 1 billion messages per day. But not every message is a unique search query – many are back-and-forth replies in a single conversation. A Semrush analysis of ChatGPT usage found the median conversation length is 3 messages, and the average about 8 messages. Using that, SparkToro estimated ChatGPT sees roughly 125 million distinct prompt sessions per day (i.e. 1 billion / 8).
Next comes a key adjustment: not every ChatGPT session is analogous to a web search. In fact, Semrush’s study of some 80 million ChatGPT prompts found only 30% had “search-like” intent – things like asking for information, comparisons, or recommendations that one might otherwise Google. The majority (~70%) of ChatGPT’s usage is for other purposes: writing code, brainstorming content, solving math problems, drafting emails, you name it (source: sparktoro.com). Those aren’t searches for websites or facts in the traditional sense. So SparkToro multiplied by this 0.3 factor, yielding about 37.5 million search-equivalent queries on ChatGPT per day. In essence, they treated ChatGPT as conducting ~37.5M “informational searches” daily, versus Google’s 14B.
Finally, they folded ChatGPT into a classic market share pie. The result: ChatGPT at 0.25% of global search share in 2024, versus Google at 93.57%, Bing ~4.1%, Yahoo ~1.35%, and DuckDuckGo ~0.73%. Figure 1 above visualizes just how massive Google’s lead is. It’s not even close. ChatGPT’s search-like usage was on the order of one 373rd of Google’s.
SparkToro’s methodology is transparent, but it relies on a chain of assumptions: that 1 billion messages/day was accurate and sustained; that 8:1 message-to-query ratio holds; and that 30% of prompts truly parallel search. Each step introduces possible error. For example, if ChatGPT’s average conversation length were shorter, or if more people start using ChatGPT’s browsing tools for current info, the gap with Google could narrow. Conversely, if many ChatGPT prompts are follow-ups refining an answer (not new intents), one could argue even fewer are equivalent to a fresh Google search. Either way, the exercise highlights a crucial point: ChatGPT isn’t mostly being used as a search replacement today – it’s largely used for other tasks.
Did Google Really Gain from AI? (Peeking at the Fine Print)
SparkToro’s finding of 21.6% search growth in one year raised some eyebrows. If users had a shiny new toy in ChatGPT, how on earth did Google searches surge more than 20%? Part of the answer might be Google’s own AI infusion. In 2023–24, Google rolled out generative AI snippets (Search Generative Experience, or SGE) to augment search results. Instead of users asking one question and leaving, the AI Overview can encourage follow-up queries. Pichai noted testers were “seeing an increase in search usage” with the new AI results. And indeed, it appears those users searched more. SparkToro’s data (from Datos’ device panel) showed searchers did significantly more queries in 2024 than in 2023, not only on Google.com but across verticals like Images, News, and Maps. In particular, Google’s AI-driven Search Overviews did not cannibalize search volume – they stimulated it.
However, more searching did not mean more clicking. There’s a dark flip side to AI answers: they often satisfy the query on the spot, resulting in no click to any website. By the end of 2024, an estimated 60% of Google searches ended without a click to external content (source: searchengineland.com). That’s up from roughly 50% a few years prior. So while Google saw record search activity, publishers and marketers felt the pinch – fewer visitors coming through. Internal Google changes (like showcasing AI summaries or direct answers) can increase engagement within Google while reducing traffic out. In SparkToro’s words, AI answers “sure as heck” increased searches, but they “do seem to kill clickthrough rates”. One study found that on pages with Google’s AI overview, the organic click-through rate (CTR) to websites dropped 70% and even paid ad CTR dropped 12%. In other words, Google might be feeding users more answers without them ever leaving Google’s ecosystem.
From a methodology standpoint, SparkToro’s heavy reliance on third-party data (Datos panel, Semrush clickstream) means their results are only as good as those inputs. The Google growth figure came from a desktop-only panel extrapolated to all devices – if mobile or certain geographies behaved differently, the true global growth might be lower (or higher). Also, SparkToro’s comparison treated each ChatGPT prompt as independent, but many ChatGPT sessions replace not one search, but several. For instance, planning a trip via ChatGPT might replace a series of Google searches (flights, hotels, weather, etc.) with one conversational session. So measuring raw query counts could understate the competitive impact on multi-step research tasks. These nuances don’t invalidate SparkToro’s core point – Google is still massive – but they remind us to be cautious. Big picture: by mid-2024, Google’s search business remained a juggernaut, seemingly unfazed – or even boosted – by the rise of AI assistants, at least when looking at high-level query counts.
Contrarian Signals: Is ChatGPT a Bigger Threat Than It Looks?
Not everyone is convinced that Google’s lead is as secure as the 373× stat suggests. In fact, some analysts argue that Google’s dominance has begun to erode in subtle ways that query totals alone don’t capture. A report from The New York Times in mid-2025 – echoed by analysts at Third Bridge – suggested Google’s global search market share dipped below 90% for the first time in a decade, thanks largely to users flocking to AI tools (source: economictimes.indiatimes.com). These analysts estimated that “OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now handling 15–20% of Google’s daily search volume”economictimes.indiatimes.com. That astounding claim (implying billions of daily AI queries) conflicts with SparkToro’s 0.25% figure – possibly because it counts all ChatGPT queries, not just search-like ones. If ChatGPT handles 1B+ prompts/day as of 2025 (which OpenAI’s data confirms (srouse: digitalinformationworld.com), that is roughly 7% of Google’s 14B – still single digits, but higher than 0.25%. Some bullish analysts may even be projecting future growth, anticipating ChatGPT’s share to hit the teens. While the exact figures differ, the directional trend is that ChatGPT’s usage has exploded, and some portion of that directly substitutes for searches people would have otherwise done on Google.
Indeed, by mid-2025 ChatGPT had grown into one of the top websites in the world. It was the 5th most visited website globally in June 2025, with around 5.4 billion visits that month (source: digitalinformationworld.com). For reference, Google.com saw about 96.5 billion visits that month – so Google still had ~18× more traffic by visits. But ChatGPT’s rise has been swift: it jumped from ~1.6 billion monthly visits in early 2024 to over 5 billion by spring 2025. In late 2024 alone, monthly ChatGPT visits leapt from 3.1B in September to 3.7B in October as new features rolled out. According to Similarweb data, ChatGPT’s web traffic was basically flat in mid-2023 after its launch hype, but then accelerated again through 2024 and into 2025(source: digitalinformationworld.com). This suggests that usage of AI assistants is not a fad that peaked early – it’s evolving and possibly entering a second growth phase as AI integrates more into daily workflows.
Qualitatively, user behavior hints at cracks in Google’s armor for certain types of queries. For example, consider the software developer community: questions that used to send programmers searching Google and clicking Stack Overflow are now increasingly posed to ChatGPT. In early 2023, developer Q&A site Stack Overflow experienced a sudden traffic decline – down ~14% from March to April 2023 alone (srouce: gizmodo.com) – which coincided with the rise of ChatGPT as a coding aid. By May 2023, Stack Overflow openly stated “ChatGPT is making a dent in [our] traffic”. Why? Because many coders found it faster to get a single, synthesized answer from ChatGPT than to scour forums The same story played out in educational help: homework-help site Chegg saw its new user growth plummet and blamed ChatGPT for offering instant answers that undercut its service. In short, for highly structured Q&A needs (programming help, homework solutions), ChatGPT became a compelling alternative to the Google search + website browsing routine. Google’s overall numbers didn’t collapse, but these niche declines illustrate how specific search verticals can be disrupted by a better AI experience.
On the other hand, some contrarians argue the threat is overblown – at least in the near term. They point out that Google’s core business (web search, especially for commercial queries) has proven resilient. Many consumers still default to Google for things like shopping searches, local business info, or navigating to websites – areas where ChatGPT isn’t as convenient or up-to-date. In fact, recent data showed Gen Z users actually increased their use of Google for e-commerce searches in 2023–2024 (source: finance.yahoo.com), despite talk of them using TikTok or AI. Moreover, one can view ChatGPT not purely as a rival but as a customer or collaborator to Google: OpenAI’s ChatGPT relies on cloud computing (and notably signed a deal to use Google Cloud for some services , and Google itself is developing competing AI (Gemini) to ensure it doesn’t lose the AI race. By early 2025, Google’s own Gemini AI assistant had quietly amassed hundreds of millions of users (a Morgan Stanley survey claimed 450 million users for Gemini, second only to ChatGPT) (soucre: io-fund.com). Google is hedging its bets by building AI into its products – from search to enterprise tools – effectively playing both offense and defense. This duality led one Guardian analyst to note that “ChatGPT is arguably a threat to Google’s search business, but it’s also a customer”, capturing the nuanced relationship between incumbents and disruptors (source: theguardian.com).
Where both sides agree is that user expectations are shifting. People have now seen what it’s like to get a single, conversational answer with no ads. Even if Google’s numbers haven’t cratered, the perception of search is changing. A July 2025 feature in The Economic Times summed it up: users are drawn to ChatGPT’s “comprehensive, ad-free answers” and find it “better than Google for asking questions” like planning a complex vacation itinerary (source: economictimes.indiatimes.com). Google’s results, in contrast, often require sifting through ads and multiple sites. This doesn’t mean everyone will dump Google overnight – but it hints that Google’s famed user experience advantage is being challenged. The mere fact that Google felt compelled to launch its own chatbot-style search mode (the SGE “AI mode”) is evidence that the threat is forcing evolution. As one tech analyst put it, Google’s official stance is that “A.I. is a tailwind for search, not a headwind”, meaning they believe AI will ultimately drive more search usage. The reality is likely more complex: AI is both a tailwind (making search more interactive) and a potential headwind (enabling alternatives to traditional search).
Different Tools, Different Purposes: How People Use Google vs ChatGPT
To truly understand the competitive dynamic, we must recognize that Google Search and ChatGPT often serve different user goalds. A CMO might ask: are people actually using ChatGPT to search the way they use Google? The answer, so far, is largely no – they use it to do things. Let’s break down the typical use cases:
Google is the master of immediate, transactional queries. Think of the countless times you’ve typed a quick question or navigational query: “weather tomorrow”, “plumber near me”, “Acme Corp website”, “buy iPhone 15”. These are classic Google searches – often one-and-done tasks with a definitive answer or destination. They have strong intent signals (local, commercial, navigational) and Google excels at surfacing a relevant result or instant answer. As one SEO agency observed, Google searches tend to be immediate and specific (source: kickstartseo.co.uk). Users expect Google to retrieve an authoritative webpage (or map location, or product listing) almost instantaneously. There’s also the trust factor: if you need the official site or a real-time update (news, stock prices, etc.), Google’s indexed web results are the go-to. Notably, Google is also where the advertising dollars concentrate – high-intent queries that can lead to a purchase are exactly what Google monetizes so well with search ads.
ChatGPT, in contrast, shines in complex, exploratory, and generative tasks. Users treat ChatGPT more like a consultant or creative partner than a directory of links. Many ChatGPT prompts are things you’d never plug into a search box.
For example: “Help me plan a marketing strategy for my new bakery”, or “Explain why my website’s traffic might be dropping and how to fix it”. These are multi-part, conversational prompts – the kind you’d break down into dozens of Google queries and hours of research reading blogs and guides. ChatGPT condenses that into a single dialogue.
As one comparison put it, “Google’s for finding; AI’s for understanding.” (source: kickstartseo.co.uk)
Rather than just retrieving facts, ChatGPT can generate text, code, and images, or simplify and synthesize information. About 70% of ChatGPT’s usage is non-search precisely because people use it for tasks like coding help, writing copy, drafting emails, solving problems, or just for fun and curiosity (e.g. brainstorming names or getting a quick translation).
Another qualitative difference is interaction style. Google is a “type and get results” experience – if the first try doesn’t yield what you need, you reformulate your query (which, as data shows, users often do – about 17–29% of the time they immediately adjust their search terms on desktop/mobile (source: keywordseverywhere.com). ChatGPT, on the other hand, encourages refining via conversation: you ask a broad question, get an answer, then say “thanks, now give me more detail on X” or “what about scenario Y?”. It’s iterative but with memory of context. Users report this is especially useful in planning or learning scenarios – e.g. interactive troubleshooting, or step-by-step planning (trips, projects, recipes). A travel example: one user described using ChatGPT to plan a vacation, preferring it because the answer wasn’t split across 10 different sites full of ads. ChatGPT provided a cohesive itinerary suggestion in one go, something Google would make you piece together.
That said, ChatGPT’s conversational magic has limits. It lacks real-time knowledge (unless augmented with plugins or browsing). It may produce plausible but incorrect answers (the well-known “hallucination” issue), which can be a deal-breaker for fact-finding missions. Many users inherently trust that Google will show multiple sources, including official ones, so they can cross-verify information – whereas an AI might state something confidently without citation.
Trust also ties to enterprise integration: Google search is a public web tool, whereas ChatGPT can be more closed-loop or customized. We see companies integrating ChatGPT (or similar LLMs) with their internal data – something you’d never do with Google. For instance, software firms have started using ChatGPT-based assistants fine-tuned on their documentation to help engineers debug or answer customer queries. In that sense, ChatGPT is acting as a new interface for knowledge retrieval beyond the public internet, including proprietary knowledge bases. Google is trying to play in this space (e.g. via Cloud’s Vertex AI or enterprise search products), but it historically excelled at public web indexing, not a company’s private data.
In summary, Google and ChatGPT aren’t exact substitutes – they’re more like overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The overlap (roughly 30% of ChatGPT use cases, per Semrush (source: sparktoro.com) includes straightforward information queries, comparison shopping questions, or basic know-how (“How do I calculate mortgage payments?”).
The non-overlap: Google dominates for quick fact retrieval, location-based queries, latest news, and anything where up-to-the-minute accuracy or official sources matter.
ChatGPT dominates for open-ended questions, advice, creative generation, summarizing or explaining complex topics, and tasks one might previously have done by stitching together info from multiple Google results. The key for enterprises is to recognize where your audience’s “search intent” might be shifting towards chat-based tools and where it remains firmly in the search engine realm.
Threat Assessment: Is Google’s Core Search Business Safe?
From a market share standpoint, Google’s core search franchise appears safe for now – none of the AI upstarts have dented its usage enough to show up beyond a rounding error in the stats.
But “safe” is relative.
Google’s position is a bit like a reigning champion boxer: still winning every round, yet suddenly facing an unconventional challenger that forces a change in stance. The real threat to Google is not that ChatGPT will replace it overnight, but that it will change user expectations and chip away at high-value search behaviors over time. Here’s how to think about the threat:
1. Volume vs. Value:
Google can afford to lose millions of low-value searches and hardly feel it – especially if those are, say, homework questions from students (not lucrative for ads) or idle curiosities.
However, if users start using AI assistants for queries that do have high commercial value (e.g. researching a pricey electronics purchase, finding a hotel, or seeking legal/medical guidance), that’s more concerning.
Currently, many such searches still go through Google, but anecdotal evidence shows early adopters are trying ChatGPT or Bing Chat for things like product research (“What 4K TV should I buy under $1000?”) or travel planning.
If those use cases grow, Google could feel a revenue pinch even if overall query volume stays high. So far, the ad dollars haven’t dramatically shifted – Google’s search ad revenue continues to grow (Alphabet reported a 14% revenue rise in Q2 2025 (source: economictimes.indiatimes.com). But Google is keenly aware of protecting the valuable queries that drive that revenue. Hence its quick move to inject AI summaries on results pages for product queries, hoping to keep those shoppers on Google.
2. The Integration Wildcard:
ChatGPT’s threat is as much about distribution as direct usage. Unlike search engines which people visit directly, AI assistants are being woven into other products and platforms. OpenAI has released a ChatGPT API, and companies are building it into office software, customer service bots, and more. Microsoft’s Bing, for example, integrated GPT-4 into its search – bringing ChatGPT-like answers to the Bing interface.
Apple, as rumored, might bake AI assistance deeper into devices. If AI assistants become ambient (available everywhere), users might bypass Google more often without consciously thinking “I’m going to ChatGPT’s website.” For instance, a professional using Microsoft 365 can ask the built-in Copilot (powered by OpenAI) to analyze a spreadsheet or draft an email, tasks they might have once searched templates or advice for on Google. Similarly, voice assistants are getting smarter – we may soon ask Alexa or Siri complex questions that they answer via an LLM, not a web search. Google, to its credit, is also a player here (it’s integrating generative AI into Gmail, Docs, Android, and so on), but its business model has always revolved around web search traffic. The more user questions get answered away from the traditional search engine (even if by Google-powered AI in another context), the more Google’s advertising fortress may be circumvented.
Similarly, Open Ai’s Acquisition of the AI wearables shop IO, is making a significant move intoy the hardware space. The IO team includes former Apple Design chief Jony Ive and a team of apple designers. Again, this would be a trheat since they would be bypassing browser based search.
3. User Trust and Habits:
Google’s greatest asset is habit – “Googling” is second nature to billions. ChatGPT has to overcome that inertia, and trust is part of it. Early adopters might rave about ChatGPT, but many average users still approach it cautiously, if at all. A Pew Research survey in early 2025 showed that while a majority of younger adults had tried AI chatbots, older demographics lagged behind (source: nerdynav.comnerdynav.com).
Trust is also about reliability: Google’s results can be imperfect or spammy, but outright factual errors by Google are rare (since it’s showing sources). ChatGPT, in contrast, can sometimes fabricate answers. Enterprises worry about that – hence we see companies like Bloomberg developing their own in-house LLM trained on vetted financial data, rather than relying on ChatGPT for mission-critical info. If OpenAI and others can improve factual accuracy and cite sources, trust in AI answers will grow. Google is certainly not standing still on this either: features like SGE cite their sources, and Google’s own Bard now provides references and has real-time information. The competition in trust and accuracy is on.
So, is the threat to Google “real, overblown, or simply evolving”?
It’s evolving. In 2023, alarmists thought ChatGPT usage would immediately cannibalize Google – that was overblown given Google’s usage actually rose. But to say there’s no threat would be short-sighted. The threat is just not a head-on replacement of Google;
it’s a gradual shift in how certain queries are performed and how users expect to get information. Google’s core business is likely secure in the next year or two – we’re not going to see 50% of people stop googling things.
However, we will see continued diversification of search behavior. By 2025 and 2026, it’s plausible that a small but significant percentage of searches (maybe low single-digit percentages globally, but higher in certain niches) will have moved to AI assistants or alternative platforms. If, say, 5% of global search volume shifts away from traditional search, that could equate to hundreds of millions of queries per day not happening on Google – which is not trivial. And if those include valuable commercial queries, Google will feel it.
Google’s strategic response – integrating AI deeply into search – indicates it is treating the threat as real. The search bar might evolve into more of a conversational interface over time, and Google is willing to cannibalize some of its classic “10 blue links” experience to stay ahead. The upshot: Google’s search business isn’t dying, but it is transforming under competitive and technological pressures for the first time in decades.
Adaptation Strategies: Navigating the Coexistence of Search and AI
For enterprises and marketers, the message is clear: search and AI-driven discovery will coexist, and strategy can’t ignore either. C-level leaders in marketing, SEO, and digital strategy should take a dual-pronged approach:
- Double Down on Core SEO (But Evolve It): Google remains the gateway to ~90% of consumer search queries, so traditional SEO is still mission-critical. Ensuring your company’s content ranks well
on Google for relevant queries is as important as ever – perhaps more, since organic spots are giving way to AI snippets and zero-click answers. The basics (technical SEO, quality content, mobile optimization, site speed, etc.) still apply. What’s changing is what it means to “rank”. Your content might need to appease both algorithms and AI summaries. For example, content that succinctly answers questions (featured-snippet style) can be beneficial for both getting a Google snippet and being used in an AI answer. Structured data (schema markup) that helps Google understand and feature your content is wise to implement; it could also help AI models interpret your content accurately. One mistake to avoid is abandoning Google for the new shiny thing – some businesses have over-rotated to AI and let their search presence slip.
Given Google’s enduring dominance, that’s like “training for the 2028 Olympics while missing the 2024 qualifiers,” as one marketer quipped. In other words, don’t neglect the SEO fundamentals that drive traffic today. - Optimize Content for AI Visibility:
Parallel to traditional SEO, we now have AI optimization (AIO?). This is more nascent, but forward-thinking teams are already experimenting. What does it mean practically? First, understand how AI assistants get information. ChatGPT, for instance, was trained on vast web data (up to a cutoff) and now can use plugins or browse when explicitly invoked. There’s no “AI ranking algorithm” akin to Google’s PageRank – but being referenced by authoritative sources, being part of known datasets, and having well-structured, easy-to-parse content can only help. Some strategies emerging:
- Publish Authoritative, Well-Structured Content:
AI models trained on internet data will have ingested a lot of content up to 2021 (and beyond, as they update). If your company produces high-quality articles, research, or documentation that is widely cited, that content is more likely to be reflected correctly in AI answers. Conversely, thin or duplicate content won’t register. Example: When someone asks ChatGPT about the best CRM software, will it “know” about your product? Only if information about your product was prominent in its training or accessible via tools.
This means investing in thought leadership and reference content that gets cited (so it seeps into the AI zeitgeist). - Leverage Structured Knowledge Bases:
Enterprises are building their own chatbots trained on their data (for internal use or for customers). If you have a rich knowledge base or FAQ, consider implementing an AI assistant on your site. This not only provides a new interface for users (some customers might prefer asking a question in a chat on your site versus using your site’s search function), but it prepares you for a future where customers come to expect conversational support. Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are making it easier to spin up custom chatbots with your content. For marketing leaders, this is a chance to own the conversation about your brand in the AI space. Instead of hoping a generic AI yields the correct answer about your product, you provide a branded AI that you can control. - Monitor AI Mentions and Feedback:
Just as brands monitor search engine rankings and social media mentions, it’s time to monitor AI responses related to your business. There have been instances where ChatGPT or Bing gives outdated or incorrect info about a company or product. Enterprises should treat this like a reputation/accuracy issue. If misinformation crops up, it might be worth publishing clarifications on your site (which eventually AI will ingest) or even using channels like OpenAI’s feedback tools to suggest corrections. It’s a new frontier for PR and SEO teams alike.
- Publish Authoritative, Well-Structured Content:
- Balance Content for Humans and AI – in the spirit of Elevated Collaborative IntellgenceTM
As AI usage grows, a challenge emerges: writing content for two audiences – human readers and AI summarizers. For example, a classic SEO article might be 2,000 words of in-depth content (great for a human researcher), but an AI might ingest that and only ever convey a one-paragraph summary of it to the end-user. Some marketing teams worry that their content might never be seen in full, just distilled by AI. This is a valid concern – it might mean the value of top-of-funnel content shifts from lead generation to brand awareness (i.e. an AI might quote your brand’s expertise but the user doesn’t click through). One way to adapt is to ensure your content is structured in a hierarchical way: a punchy summary or key takeaways up top (which an AI or snippet might grab), followed by detail for those who click in. This way you cater to both the skimmers (and AI) and the deep readers. Some enterprises are also experimenting with content that explicitly invites engagement, e.g. tools, interactive widgets, or community features that an AI can’t replicate easily – giving people a reason to click through from an AI answer. - Advertising and Conversion Strategy:
If more answers are delivered directly on Google or via AI, how do you get in front of customers? This is where marketers have to be creative. Google’s SGE presents opportunities to still appear (for example, if your content is cited as part of an AI answer, that’s a bit of visibility, though not a clickable link today). Google will likely introduce new ad formats within AI results if usage grows – keep an eye on that and be ready to test AI-tailored ads (Google has hinted at this). Meanwhile, consider non-search channels that are rising: if Gen Z is searching on TikTok for some things, maybe your content needs to be there too (short video answers). If AI assistants are used, maybe sponsoring or partnering with certain platforms (for instance, getting your service integrated as a plugin or tool within an AI ecosystem) could be the future equivalent of SEO. We already saw early moves: e.g., travel companies like Expedia built a ChatGPT plugin so that when users want to plan trips conversationally, Expedia is the fulfillment mechanism. That’s a new kind of “distribution channel” for content and services. - Upskill Your Teams in AI: Lastly, enterprise leaders should ensure their teams leverage AI for efficiency. This isn’t directly about search traffic, but it’s the other side of the coin – using AI to enhance your marketing and SEO efforts internally. Content writers can use GPT tools to draft and brainstorm (though human editing and originality remain crucial). SEO analysts can use AI to crunch large data sets or generate meta descriptions at scale. Teams that embrace AI for productivity will free up time to focus on strategy and creative work. At the same time, set guidelines to maintain quality (the web is already seeing an explosion of AI-generated content; the last thing you want is your brand putting out low-quality AI spam that hurts your SEO and reputation).
Case studies are emerging of companies finding this balance. KickstartSEO, a UK agency, publicly shares how they split their focus: staying “unmissable” on Google today while also preparing content for AI platforms (source: kickstartseo.co.uk):
- Continue to invest in traditional SEO to rank in Google’s results, including meeting Google’s E-E-A-T trust guidelines, but simultaneously restructure content so that it’s easily digestible by AI.
- Rather than writing keyword-stuffed FAQs, they craft comprehensive answers in natural language that “AI systems want to reference.
- Add structured data (schema) to pages, anticipating that machine-readable context will only grow in importance
- Partner with OpenAI. E.g. educational company Chegg opted to create “CheggMate,” an AI tutor that uses ChatGPT under the hood but is specialized for students’ needs. This is a defensive and adaptive strategy – if you can’t beat them, join (or integrate) them. We can expect more enterprises to launch AI chatbot extensions of their services in the coming year.
The coexistence of search and LLM-based tools means marketing funnels may diversity:
Some customers will arrive via the old path (search → click → website),
others might arrive via an AI assistant (either as a referral or not arrive at your site at all, having gotten what they need from the AI).
Marketing leaders must optimize for both paths and find ways to measure and influence the AI-driven customer journey, which is a nascent field.
The Future of Enterprise Content Discovery and Distribution
Peering ahead 12–18 months, we can sketch a few likely developments in the Google vs ChatGPT saga and what they mean for enterprise content:
1. Hybrid Search Experiences Become Mainstream:
Google is likely to push its generative AI search features (currently experimental) to all users. This means a larger percentage of Google queries will trigger an AI-generated overview at the top of results. Users may start to expect a conversational summary first, with traditional results as backup. Microsoft’s Bing will continue to differentiate by closely integrating chat; it may not gain huge market share, but it will keep forcing Google’s hand on innovation. We might also see voice and multimodal search (images, voice, text all combined) growing – e.g. speaking a complex query to your phone and getting a spoken answer or a visual result compiled by AI. For enterprises, content might need to be optimized not just for text snippets, but for how an AI might present it (could your how-to article be summarized into an audio answer or a step-by-step list by an AI? If so, is it structured clearly?).
2. ChatGPT (and its peers) Get More Real-Time and Integrated:
OpenAI’s partnership ecosystem will expand. Already, OpenAI has plugins that let ChatGPT pull live information (e.g. web browsing, Expedia for travel, Instacart for groceries). Expect ChatGPT to become more app-like for end-users – possibly even a mobile assistant that can tap your calendar, emails, or other personal data with permission. This could inch it closer to certain Google functions (like Gmail or Google Assistant). By late 2024 or 2025, OpenAI or others might release enterprise versions that can securely connect to internal data, making ChatGPT a sort of front-end to corporate knowledge (some companies are already doing this themselves with the API). As ChatGPT becomes more integrated and real-time, it may handle more “search-like” tasks confidently – e.g. answering “What’s the latest news on XYZ?” by actually retrieving news (Bing’s mode already does this to an extent). This could make it more of a direct Google substitute for some users, especially if OpenAI improves citations and source transparency in those answers.
3. Continued Growth, but No Singular “Google Killer”:
In the next 12–18 months, it’s realistic that ChatGPT’s user base will continue to grow – perhaps reaching 1 billion+ monthly active users given its current trajectory (it reportedly had ~180 million daily users as of mid-2025 (source: digitalinformationworld.com), and 800 million weekly users (source: demandsage.com). However, this growth doesn’t necessarily come at Google’s direct expense one-to-one. Some growth is new usage (people asking things they might not have bothered to search before, because the conversational format invites more curiosity), and some will siphon from other platforms (forums, niche websites, even time spent on social media or YouTube for how-to content could shift to asking ChatGPT).
Google will still likely see some query growth, especially as global internet access expands and as AI features drive incremental searches. So we may end up in a world by 2026 where
Google is bigger than ever in absolute terms, yet a smaller piece of the overall search+Q&A pie.
Perhaps Google goes from ~93% of traditional search to something like 90% or high 80s, as AI assistants and alternative search methods take a sliver. That would be a notable change after a decade of almost static search market shares.
4. Enterprise Content Distribution Splits:
Content creators like us (news sites, marketers, etc.) will increasingly wrestle with how to distribute content in an AI-mediated world. We might see more publishers strike deals to feed content to AI models in exchange for visibility or compensation. For example, just as publishers optimized for Google News and featured snippets, they might in the future provide structured feeds for AI consumption.
Already, some news organizations are in talks about licensing content to AI companies to ensure accuracy and get paid for usage. If such models emerge, enterprise content strategy could involve publishing via APIs to AI services in addition to publishing on the web. Think of it as a new channel: just as social media became a channel to publish on (with its own rules and formats), AI could become another channel (e.g., providing a knowledge base that AI assistants can tap with attribution).
5. New Metrics of Success:
Today we measure SEO success with impressions, clicks, rankings.
Tomorrow, we might measure “AI mentions” or “AI referrals.” If someone uses an AI assistant to find a product and it recommends your company (even if no click happens), that’s brand exposure. We might see analytics platforms or AI vendors offering metrics on how often a brand is appearing in AI outputs.
Smart enterprises will start tracking this. It could also influence content: for instance, if an e-commerce site learns that an AI frequently recommends their product when asked about “best budget smartphones,” they’ll want to keep that advantage (ensuring their product info remains accessible and accurate to the AI, perhaps even via an official plugin or feed).
In essence, the next 12–18 months will be about integration and adjustment. AI won’t kill search; it will reshape it and spawn parallel channels. Companies that adapt by being present wherever their customers seek answers – be it on Google, Bing, ChatGPT, or some enterprise AI concierge – will thrive. Those that stick to a siloed approach (just SEO or just traditional content) might find their audience slipping away in fragments.
Finally, a cultural shift: consumers and professionals alike will become more comfortable using AI as part of daily life. The novelty will wear off; these tools will just be another option. Much like mobile vs desktop – we ended up with both, and strategies had to become mobile-friendly – we are heading toward a world where search coexists with AI assistance, and digital strategy must be AI-friendly.
The CDO TIMES Bottom Line
Google isn’t losing sleep – yet.
SparkToro’s analysis and various traffic stats reinforce that Google Search remains the undisputed king of discovery, even seeing a usage bump in the age of AI. ChatGPT and other AI tools, while growing explosively, currently pose more of a complementary role than a direct threat in pure search volume.
In 2024, ChatGPT was handling a fraction of a percent of the queries Google does. For core search needs – especially those with commercial, local, or up-to-the-minute intent – Google’s entrenched index and reliability keep it on top.
But make no mistake, the search landscape is evolving, not stagnant.
ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to hundreds of millions of users shows an appetite for conversational, on-demand knowledge.
Users are discovering new ways to get answers leveraging AI and their prompts, and those ways often bypass traditional web search. Certain niches (coding help, education, complex research) have already seen users shift from googling to chatting. Google’s answer has been to transform itself – integrating AI summaries and chat features into Search – blurring the line between engine and assistant. Over the next year, expect hybrid search-AI experiences to become normal, and for alternative platforms (Bing, AI chatbots, voice assistants) to chip away small but meaningful pieces of user attention.
For enterprise marketers and digital leaders, the mandate is clear: prepare for a world of “both/and,” not “either/or.”
Continue to prioritize Google SEO and classic search marketing, as that’s where the bulk of traffic and revenue lies today.
At the same time, adapt your content and strategy for AI-driven discovery – structure your information so that it’s easily consumed (and correctly interpreted) by AI models, and seek ways to participate in the AI ecosystem (whether through partnerships, plugins, or your own AI tools).
Educate your teams and stakeholders that we’re in an era of dual optimization: one for algorithms that rank links, another for algorithms that generate answers.
The savvy CDO or CMO will invest in content that serves dual purposes – authoritative and well-organized to please Google’s ranking factors, and concise and semantically clear to feed AI answers.
They’ll also keep a close eye on user behavior shifts: Are fewer people coming from search to certain content pieces? Are more finding us via AI recommendations?
Use those insights to adjust tactics.
Crucially, don’t get caught in false binaries – it’s not “SEO vs AI” or “Google vs ChatGPT.” It’s about leveraging the strengths of each. Google is unparalleled for reaching a broad audience with intent; ChatGPT offers depth of engagement and a chance to build more personalized interactions.
The Bottom line is that the data tells us Google’s dominance will not vanish in the next year, but the terms of engagement are changing. Just as mobile disrupted desktop or social media created new marketing channels, AI assistants are expanding how people find information. Google and ChatGPT will likely coexist, each influencing the other’s evolution. Enterprises that adapt to serve customers on both fronts will ensure they remain visible, relevant, and competitive in the new era of search.
In a nutshell: keep your SEO solid, get your AI and HI + AI strategy started, and meet your audience wherever their questions are asked – be it a search box, an AI assistant or a chat prompt.
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