ChatGPT has 12% of Google’s search volume, but Google sends 190 times more traffic to websites

Although ChatGPT accounts for almost a fifth of Google query volume, people use the platforms in different ways.

I wanted to see how ChatGPT compares to Google, not just in terms of total searches, but also the searches they compete with Google on, how much traffic they send to sites, and what CTR differences exist across systems.

Let’s dive in.

• 65% of ChatGPT usage qualifies as searchhowever, this value may be lower depending on how you define the search.
• There are such for every search-like query in ChatGPT 8.33 searches in Googlee.
• Google sends 190x more traffic to websites as ChatGPT.
• ChatGPT’s CTR is 96% lower than Google’s CTR.

The data shows two different business models: Google connects people with websites, ChatGPT keeps them connected. If AI search is the future of search, website traffic is in trouble.

Google processes over 5 trillion search queries annually (Source: Google internal data, January 2025).

ChatGPT processes 18 billion messages weekly as of July 2025, which equates to approximately 2.5 billion prompts per day.

Not every ChatGPT prompt is a search query. According to a study by OpenAI and Harvard that analyzed 1.5 million conversations, 24% are pure search and 51.6% are intent questions. Inquiring intent includes interactions in which users seek advice, perspective, or information to improve their judgment, rather than delegating the completion of a task.

I’ve seen some studies that used these numbers for comparison, but I don’t agree with them. Google can do more than just search. There are tools for calculations, translations, and more included in other categories of the study. Even things like coding help are categorized differently, but developers have been looking for problems on Google (and Stack Overflow) for many years.

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

Looking at their examples, I would classify 65% ​​of searches on ChatGPT as things traditionally searched on Google. This is higher than what the researchers classify, but I have more access to data about what people are searching than they do.

ChatGPT gets about 12% of Google’s search volume for things people have traditionally searched for on Google. For comparison, it is estimated that Bing receives 1.2 billion searches every day. ChatGPT has overtaken Bing in search!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Ahrefs has built https://chatgpt-vs-google.com/ over 76,000 websites using data from Ahrefs Web Analytics.

If we look at website traffic, Google sends 190 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT. Google accounts for almost 40% of website traffic and ChatGPT accounts for only 0.21%.

Here the platforms completely diverge.

I have calculated the numbers for the various classifications, but again I believe that my search classification is more accurate than the one 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

Final thoughts

Google remains the dominant search engine with 5.5 times more daily activity. ChatGPT made progress in the search in a short period of time. They have overtaken long-time search competitors like Bing.

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