ChatGPT now has 20% of global search traffic

For years, Google controlled search. Not most of it. All of it. That is no longer true.

New data covering worldwide search and discovery sessions shows that Google's traffic share has dropped from 89% in 2023 to 71% in Q4 2025. ChatGPT now accounts for 19.5% of global search-related traffic when mobile app usage is included, making it the second-largest search and discovery platform in the world.

This is not a gradual trend worth monitoring. It is a structural shift worth acting on now.

The numbers

Global search-related sessions have grown 26% worldwide between Q1 2023 and Q4 2025. In the US, the increase is 16%. Google has not lost traffic. It has lost share.

One methodological note matters here: most studies estimating ChatGPT's search share put the figure at 3% to 10%. Those studies measure web visits only. This data includes mobile app sessions, which account for 83% of AI sessions globally and 75% in the US. If you are benchmarking against web-only data, you are looking at a fraction of the actual picture.

The pie is getting bigger, not being divided up

The instinct is to frame this as AI taking share from Google. That framing is wrong, and it leads to the wrong strategic conclusions.

People are not replacing Google searches with ChatGPT prompts. Total search and discovery activity is growing. Buyers are now using both: starting a research journey in ChatGPT, validating it in Google, or discovering a brand through Perplexity and converting through organic search. The funnel has more entry points than it did two years ago.

The implication is not that you should deprioritize SEO. It is that SEO alone no longer covers the full discovery surface. A brand that ranks well on Google but does not appear in AI-generated answers is invisible at the start of a growing number of buying journeys.

What this means for your brand

The shift in traffic share is a measurement problem as much as it is a visibility problem. Most analytics setups were built for a world where discovery happened through clickable links. AI-driven discovery does not work that way. When ChatGPT recommends your brand, the user typically does not click through from the response. They search your name on Google or type your URL directly. Your analytics credits organic or direct traffic. The AI influence disappears.

This is why tracking AI visibility directly matters. You cannot manage what you cannot see. If you do not know whether your brand appears in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews for the queries that drive your category, you do not have a complete picture of your competitive position.

KIME tracks brand visibility across all major LLM platforms daily, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and more major LLM's. It shows where you appear, where competitors appear instead of you, and what is driving the gap.

The bottom line

ChatGPT at 20% of global search traffic is not a projection. It is the current state. The brands that treat AI search as a primary discovery channel today are building a measurement and optimization advantage that will compound as the share grows further.

The question is not whether AI search matters for your category. It already does. The question is whether you are measuring it.

Source: ChatGPT traffic adjusted for asking prompts only using ChatGPT + Harvard study "How People Use ChatGPT" (July 2024 to June 2025).