You may have seen this line in the news this week: ChatGPT’s search volume is now a fifth of Google’s. Our view is that whether this number is right can wait. This one was worked out by OpenAI itself, it hasn’t said what it compared against or over what period, and other estimates come in well below it. But some customers do open ChatGPT to ask who’s good, and that doesn’t depend on whose number is right, so what you should be looking at is how ChatGPT talks about you when it answers.

What happened

The line comes from an interview on 2 November, US time. At a dinner hosted by OpenAI, ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry told the US tech newsletter Big Technology that ChatGPT’s “volume of search-like queries” is now roughly one-fifth of Google’s. As of 6 November, we can’t find any formal article from OpenAI about this figure.

It’s worth being clear what “search” means here. ChatGPT sometimes answers straight from what it has learned and sometimes goes to the web first. As Fry puts it, every time you ask a question and it goes to the web, that counts as a search; several outlets read this to mean that plain requests for help with writing or coding don’t count. Whether to go to the web is, per 24/7 Wall St., often its own call, even when the user didn’t ask it to, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as someone typing a search into Google. OpenAI also hasn’t said which Google figure it compared against.

A fifth is 20%, and other estimates are a good deal lower. Ahrefs, which makes SEO tools, estimated in February that the figure was about 12%; seoClarity, an enterprise SEO platform, put it at 7.5% in an update on 28 October. These two numbers are calculations as well, though: Ahrefs was still working from ChatGPT data from July last year, and seoClarity says itself that its figure wasn’t actually measured. A Forbes contributor argues that the gap comes mostly from how you define a search.

As for Google, by its own account it hasn’t got any smaller. In third-quarter results from its parent company Alphabet on 28 October, the CEO said Google’s year-over-year search query growth rate is the highest it’s been in five years, so “a fifth” doesn’t mean that Google searches are falling.

Why it matters to you

Whatever this percentage finally turns out to be, it won’t change what you’re up against. Even at the lower of those two estimates, 7.5%, for every hundred queries that Google gets worldwide, ChatGPT gets seven or eight, and that’s well past a few people trying it out.

What people ask has changed too. Fry said in the interview that about two years ago people mostly came to ChatGPT for help with writing and coding, and that over the past year they’ve added a lot of other kinds of questions, like looking up people, places and things. In our view, places and things are exactly what customers ask about when they’re finding and comparing businesses. We can’t find public data on how many people in Taiwan do this, so the next line is only an inference: some of the customers looking for a business no longer start on Google.

You may be thinking that your website’s traffic report shows hardly anyone coming from ChatGPT. That’s fair: across the more than 110,000 websites that Ahrefs tracks, visitors from ChatGPT made up less than 1% of the total in October. But a report can only show the people who click through to your site, and some people have made up their minds by the time they finish reading the answer.

Suppose you run a curtain shop in Yuanlin, Changhua. Customers wanting curtains used to start by searching Google for something like “best curtains in Changhua”, then click through the shops one by one. Now imagine one of them asks ChatGPT instead: “Which curtain shops in Yuanlin are good? I want motorised curtains and someone who’ll come out to measure.” ChatGPT goes to the web and lists three shops, and you aren’t one of them. Or you are, but it says you only do traditional fabric curtains, when you started doing motorised ones last year. The customer reads that and calls someone else, nobody clicks through to your website, and of course nothing shows up in your report.

Whether it’s a fifth or 7.5%, the number won’t tell you what that customer saw.

What to do about it

It’s time to act, and what needs doing has nothing to do with this percentage. What you need to find out is whether, when customers ask about your line of business, the answer includes you and how it describes you.

One look at one answer won’t give you the full picture. With the same question, if ChatGPT goes to the web this time, the answer mostly reflects what’s on the web now; if it doesn’t next time, the answer may rest on an old impression from what it learned earlier. In our view, those two kinds of answer come from different places, so they need work in different places, and asking once only shows you one of them.

If you want to know how ChatGPT writes about you now, book a demo with one of our consultants and look at what ChatGPT has written about you. You name a service that your shop has only offered for the last year or two, and the consultant opens ChatGPT there and then and asks, looking at whether the answer includes you and whether it describes the old you or the current one. The consultant also takes you through your website’s GEO audit score: that’s geoweb.tw’s free website audit, which looks at how well AI can understand your site across 12 areas.

A demo shows you today’s answer. Changing the answers that come later is what we call managed GEO: we fix your website’s content, bring what other websites say about you into line with your site, and regularly put the same set of questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and other leading AI engines to see whether the answers have changed.

Further reading