Ok… 🙄
ChatGPT/AI adoption is great, but it’s still peanuts compared to Google. And the king of search isn’t going anywhere. In fact, Google search use GREW BY 21.64% last year.
“I’ve seen wild speculation that Google’s market share is down 5-10% since ChatGPT’s launch, and heard anecdotes across my feeds from people claiming that they never use Google and have entirely switched to AI tools.
But, there’s been no comprehensive, well-structured analysis to show the AI tools’ share of search, nor any data to back up the claims of Google’s supposed search decline.”
~Rand Fishkin
(Founder of one of the most successful SEO software companies, and now a data/traffic/trends analyst.)
Rand Fishkin just did a cool, short 4 minute video summarizing SEMrush data showing that, while a huge adoption to ChatGPT and quick, Google’s volume of usage is in the multiple billions while ChatGPT is in the millions.
Only URL (browser) data is available to calculate, showing that Google is 800% larger in query volume than ChatGPT. He estimates, and I agree, that if we included app usage that usage would be even more heavily towards Google.
Fascinating and fast adoption of AI either way, but what I found most important he said is that out of the 1/8 ChatGPT users to Google, only 30% of 1/8 are using it for commercial queries.
That volume was directly comparable to other platforms, like Pinterest and Reddit.
His point was if you’re so obsessed with optimizing for AI you’re misdirecting attention and should be equally optimizing for Pinterest and Reddit than, because volume’s way less than perceived vs Google.
Meaning, all the commercial action is still on Google.
