ChatGPT Has 12% of Google’s Search Volume but Google Sends 190x More Traffic to Websites

ChatGPT Has 12% of Google’s Search Volume but Google Sends 190x More Traffic to Websites
ChatGPT processed 2.5 billion prompts per day as of July 2025.¹ That’s 18% of Google’s 13.7 billion daily searches, based on the 5 trillion searches per day they announced in January 2025.²

While ChatGPT has nearly a fifth of Google’s query volume, people use the platforms in different ways.

I wanted to see how ChatGPT compared to Google, not just on the total number of searches, but also searches where they compete with Google, how much traffic they send to websites, and the CTR differences in the systems.

Let’s dig in.

research from OpenAI and Harvard, which analyzed 1.5 million conversations, 24% is pure search and 51.6% is asking intent. Asking intent includes interactions where users seek advice, perspective, or information to improve judgment, rather than delegating task completion.

I’ve seen some studies that used those numbers for comparison, but I don’t agree with them. Google does more than just search. There are tools for calculations, translation, and more which are included in other categories in the study. Even things like coding help are categorized differently, but devs have been searching issues on Google (and Stack Overflow) for many years.

For example, we see hundreds of millions of searches every month for people looking to translate things on Google.

Ahrefs data showing people search for translation on Google

Looking at their examples, I would classify 65% of the searches on ChatGPT as things that were traditionally searched on Google. This is higher than what the researchers classified, but I have more access to data on what people search than they did.

Category % of ChatGPT Usage ChatGPT Daily Volume % of Google’s Volume
Pure Search (facts, products, recipes) 24.0% 600 million 4.38%
Asking Intent (search + advice) 51.6% 1.29 billion 9.42%
My Search Classification (things people traditionally searched on Google) 65.0% 1.625 billion 11.86%

ChatGPT gets ~12% of the search volume of Google for things people have traditionally searched for on Google. For some comparison, it’s estimated that Bing gets 1.2 billion searches a day. ChatGPT has surpassed Bing in search!

https://chatgpt-vs-google.com/ with data from Ahrefs Web Analytics across 76,000 websites.

If we look at the traffic coming to websites, Google sends 190x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT. Google makes up nearly 40% of traffic to websites and ChatGPT just 0.21%.

Traffic data from search engines and ai assistants from Ahrefs Web Analytics

The CTR difference

This is where the platforms diverge completely.

I ran the numbers for the different classifications, but again I believe that my search classification is more accurate than those from the paper. I came up with ChatGPT having a 96% lower CTR than Google.

Calculation method: Estimated CTR = (Traffic Share % / Daily Queries in billions) × 10

Platform/Category Daily Queries Traffic Share Estimated CTR CTR vs Google
Google 13.7 billion 39.98% 29.2% Baseline
ChatGPT (Pure Search) 600 million 0.21% 3.5% 88% lower
ChatGPT (Asking Intent) 1.29 billion 0.21% 1.6% 94% lower
ChatGPT (My Search Classification) 1.625 billion 0.21% 1.3% 96% lower
ChatGPT (All Usage) 2.5 billion 0.21% 0.84% 97% lower

Final thoughts

Google remains the dominant search engine with 5.5x more daily activity. ChatGPT made headway into search in a short amount of time. They’ve passed longtime search rivals like Bing.

However, I’m not sure if website owners will accept the drop in traffic or if they will eventually push back on AI search.

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