The once unquestionable dominance of Google as the benemoth of online search is facing a paradigm shift, as a wave of AI powered search tools, led by the ChatGPT most prominently, rapidly drives a shift in how people search and the tools they trust and offer the best user experience when it comes to finding information.
Here are some stats showing just how quickly the adoption of AI tools like ChatGPT are driving a change in search behaviour and usage – and potentially undermining Google’s dominance.
1. Google drops below 90% share of the search engine market for first time
Google has always had the majority share of the search engine market, with over a 90% share. But in mid 2024, its share dropped below 90% for the first time. At the time of writing this post in July 2025, it has a 89.54% share of the market.
In a similar time period, Bing has increased its share from 3.32% in February to just under 4% in July 2025. Whilst this change might not seem significant, it’s interesting to think about when considering that OpenAI has a partnership with Bing and it uses Bing’s index to search the web inside ChatGPT.
2. Gartner predicts a 50% drop in organic search by 2028 due to AI search
Based on its research and surveys, Gartner believes that the ‘rapid adoption of GenAI in search engines will significantly disrupt CMOs’ ability to harness organic search to drive sales.’
Emily Weiss, Senior Principal Researcher in the Gartner Marketing Practice, added “Marketing leaders whose brands rely on SEO should consider allocating resources to testing other channels in order to diversify.”
3. Similarweb shows ChatGPT is now the 5th most visited website in the world
In April 2025 ChatGPT took over X to become the 5th most visited website in the world. Impressive by any measure, but even more so when you consider wasn’t even 3 years old at this point.
And what’s just as impressive is the ongoing growth and just how quickly they are adopting new users.
4. ChatGPT could overtake Google by 2030… or even 2026
There is a lot of debate about just how quickly ChatGPT could surpass Google given the growth rate above.
Growth advisor Kevin Indig has analysed lots of data and reckons ChatGPT might overtake Google could overtake Google in terms of visits in December 2027, but notes that if you take just the last 12 months of growth data, this could happen by mid 2026.
5, Ahrefs say 63% of websites receive AI traffic
Ahrefs undertook a study of 3,000 websites to analyse the make up of AI traffic in February 2025, identifying 63% of websites were receiving referral traffic from AI tools.
Of this ChatGPT was the biggest referrer, accounting for 50% of AI traffic.
But measuring how much brand discovery is really happening in AI tools is hard given that they don’t always include links in their answers – the so called AI search dark funnel.
6. Ahrefs believes AI traffic has grown ~9.7x since last year (June 2025)
Over the past year, the average site’s search traffic has dropped by about 21%, while its AI traffic has grown roughly 10 times. This is according to another Ahrefs study of approximately 82,000 websites.
This rate of growth is very stark, and a clear sign brands should be thinking hard about their AI visibility strategy.
