Is Google Losing Searchers to AI? Shocking New AI Search Data

Shocking new AI search data.

So Rand Fishkin tweeted this. So it says, the first question here is, is Google losing searchers to AI? Which I think is a great question. Number 2, how do Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini stack up? I think that's a good one. Number 3, what percent of users visit major AI tools each month and is it growing? And I feel like, Neil, you might have an answer to the third one. But before I scroll down, do you want to answer any of these? Before I read.

He can get— you can give the responses, but from what we see, and it could be different from his responses, the first one is, is we're seeing Google not necessarily lose people to AI platforms. We're seeing people use multiple platforms. We're still seeing Google's popularity, but at the same time, we're seeing popularity increase for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and all these other solutions out there. And Google's AI responses, have drastically improved in the last, call it few months compared to when they first launched them. So that was the first one. That's at least the data that we're seeing because when we look at average traffic going to websites that are doing SEO, we're not really seeing huge declines or anything like that. Yep. And if you look at it, look at this, the percentage of users on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google. Look at Google's not dying or anything, they're just using all the platforms. That's the biggest thing that we're seeing.

Yep. I'm seeing the same thing too. And we do, I mean, I'm sure you have search filters for your Google Analytics so you can see which LLMs are increasing over time. Sure, we can say it's gone up 10, 15x in the last 12 months or so, but it's still a very tiny number. But I do believe that number is going to continue to exponentially go up because I don't know about you, Neil. I actually, I do know about you. You continue to use Google quite a bit. I use Perplexity a lot this past week and ChatGPT a lot this past week. And whenever I argue with my mom now, I just translate something into Mandarin and it just does my arguing for me. So that's another thing.

Yeah.

Which I'll bring up in a second. So here, let me scroll up here because they have multiple graphs here. Okay, so this chart, you want to read this one?

Yeah, percentage of users on ChatGPT and Perplexity from 31st October 2024 to Jan 16th, 2025. They did see a dip during the holiday period, but when you look at their growth from November to January, it's pretty much flat from percentage of users.

Yep. Okay. All 3 services showed growth in average number of sessions per user over the year of 2024. So Google was 11.47 to 14.12. And that's Google, by the way, guys, this is still Google Search. So when Neil says Google isn't dying, have you seen this? That's a pretty insane number.

It is.

I still think Google's dying, but not in the way that people think.

Google's not dying from loss of traffic.

They're dying from a loss of market share. Just like Facebook. Facebook used to be the king of social media. Facebook still makes a ton of money. They're just not number one. And depending on the audience that you talk to, some people say TikTok's number one, some people say Instagram's number one. It really depends on the age group that you're going after and the content type that you're focusing on. But Facebook still makes a ton of money. And Google's market share went from it being the main solution to search to now there's 46.1 billion daily searches and Google has roughly 18% of the market share. Does it mean Google's losing in popularity from a traffic standpoint?

No, not really.

But are they losing from a market share standpoint?

Yes.

And that's okay because there's still a ton of money to be made.

This is amazing. Look, so ChatGPT went from 0.43 average number of sessions per user to 1.27. So it tripled. And then Perplexity went from 0.007 to 0.045. So you can see the growth over time. I think, yeah, you can just see this and then you can see ChatGPT is rising. So this is interesting. Average number of sessions per user on ChatGPT and Perplexity. ChatGPT goes up a lot. Perplexity is going up. It's not as crazy of a hockey stick. And then I think the last graph we'll look at over here is stickiness factor. And then I think I'm going to read this article myself later. I'm going to save it over here. So the stickiness factor, those of you that can't see this right now, measures user engagement and retention by evaluating how frequently users return to a tool. It is often quantified using the DAU/MAU ratio. So DAU means daily active users, monthly active users is MAU. And a higher stickiness factor indicates that a significant portion of users engage with the tool regularly, reflecting its ability to integrate into users' routines and maintain their interest over time. So you can see for Google stickiness in the yellow line over here, stickiness factor is 20%. And then it goes up. all the way up to 30%, and then it's kind of dropped into the middle, like 25% or so. And then ChatGPT rose from about 10%, peaked at a little over 20%, and still it's close to 20% right now. So I think, look, although the average stickiness of Google remains higher, 25.35% compared to ChatGPT, 16.78%, ChatGPT stickiness grew at a faster rate. So they're seeing a lot more retention. And earlier what I just told you, I use it to argue with my mom. I use it to do research for my eyes because my LASIK, my eyes hurt like hell. It recommended the right thing. Like it does a lot of stuff for me. So I find I'm using it more because there's more utility that I'm getting from it. That's all.

Yeah.

All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more. And we'll see you on the other side.

No, and I still find that when I use ChatGPT, for example, like if I'm asking very detailed questions, I was asking you a question earlier today on the number of algorithm updates that Google has performed over the last—

Of course you would ask that.

You know, 10 years. And I wanted the number for each year. And keep in mind, I pay for my ChatGPT subscription. I don't know what it costs, maybe a few hundred bucks a month. I think it's like $200. Like the responses are just terrible for some of these things. And what I find is when you're doing research, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's a big miss. And this is why people use multiple platforms. I got the data from Google and it was much better. It took me, call it 15, 20 minutes, but I got it and it was much more accurate than going to ChatGPT. And heck, I even did a Google search and I got the rough answer in less than a minute because I just went to images. And there were some charts and there was one of Moz, but Moz was missing 2 of the years for the algorithm updates, but they had the majority more than the last 10 years. But either way, it was just a rough data point for me because I was looking this up due to the fact that someone was asking me like, oh no, Google isn't actually making more algorithm changes over time, they're making less and less. I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure they're making more. And I was doing a Google search for it, but ChatGPT failed me at it. And the point I'm making isn't that ChatGPT is better than Google or vice versa. It's people are going to use multiple platforms because they're better at different things.

All right, so that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And there will be no more Agency Owners Association. We'll save that for another Marketing School episode. And that being said, you know, we'll have some other things to throw your way in the near future. So Catch you later.