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 year 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.

Contents

Key takeaways
Daily volume comparison
How much of ChatGPT is search?
Website traffic comparison
The CTR difference

65% of ChatGPT usage qualifies as search, but this can be lower depending on how you define search.
For every search-like query in ChatGPT, there are 8.33 searches in Google.
Google sends 190x more traffic to websites than ChatGPT.
ChatGPT’s CTR is 96% lower than Google’s CTR.

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

Platform	Daily Searches/Prompts	Annual Total
Google	13.7 billion	5+ trillion
ChatGPT	2.5 billion	~912 billion

Google processes over 5 trillion searches annually (source: Google Internal Data, January 2025).

ChatGPT handles 18 billion messages weekly as of July 2025, which equals approximately 2.5 billion prompts per day.

Not every ChatGPT prompt is a search query. According to 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.

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!

If you haven’t seen it yet, Ahrefs built <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%.

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.

Post byPatrick Stox

Patrick Stox is an independent SEO consultant. Former Product Advisor, Technical SEO, and Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. Before that he was a Technical SEO at IBM for many years, worked at an agency, had his own consultancy, and was in-house at a B2B company. A long time ago he started his career as a developer.

He’s an organizer for the Triangle SEO Meetup, the Tech SEO Connect conference, he runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit.

Patrick was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and reviewer for the 2022 chapter. He helped define the role of Search Marketing Strategist for the US Department of Labor. He also co-wrote the SEO Book For Beginners by Ahrefs and was the Technical Review Editor for The Art of SEO 4th Edition.

He’s spoken at 100+ industry events including Pubcon, SMX, Tech SEO Boost, Ad World, Digital Summit, and many more. He’s written 100+ articles for industry sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, MarTech, and right here at Ahrefs. He was a finalist for SEO Speaker of the Year and SEO Contributor of the Year at the 2018 Search Engine Land Awards. He was also an EzineArticles Platinum author back in the day and still has the mug to prove it.

Patrick has judged nearly a dozen search awards for multiple years including the US Search Awards, UK Search Awards, and Interactive Marketing Awards. He participated in and documented the world’s largest SEO contest to date, the Wix SEO Hero contest which he arguably should have won.

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