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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed ChatGPT hit 1 billion prompts per day back in December, jumping to 2.5 billion by July – as we reported earlier this summer. Sounds massive, right? Not quite. Most of that traffic comes from API calls – businesses integrating GPT into their products, not actual people searching for answers.
A Harvard and OpenAI study found that only 21.3% of ChatGPT prompts are “search-like” – meaning someone’s actually looking for information rather than generating text or code. Do the math: that’s roughly 66 million search-intent queries daily.
Compare that to Google’s 5 trillion searches in 2024, or about 14 billion per day. Even DuckDuckGo sends more referral traffic than ChatGPT right now.
Source: searchengineland.com
AI Search Hype vs Reality
According to BrightEdge data, AI search tools drive less than 1% of website referrals. The gap was even wider earlier this year – Fishkin estimated Google was 373x bigger than ChatGPT back in March.
Here’s the kicker: SparkToro and Datos research found that when people start using AI tools, their Google searches actually increase. Users aren’t replacing Google – they’re adding AI on top of their existing search habits.
What This Means for Ecommerce
If you’re running an online store or managing digital marketing, don’t panic about AI search killing SEO. Google still owns discovery. Yes, AI Overviews are eating some clicks, and ChatGPT might matter more than DuckDuckGo in certain niches, but the volume difference is staggering.
Focus your SEO efforts where your customers actually spend time. For most ecommerce businesses, that’s still Google – by a landslide. AI search is real and growing, but reports of Google’s death are greatly exaggerated. The search giant isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
