What 13 Months of Data Tell Us About Google vs. ChatGPT + the State of Search Engines

Google vs. ChatGPT Full Report [PDF Download]

I follow data. I spend a lot of time with it.

In the spirit of building a more transparent community (Michael King's goal of the Relevance Engineering concept presented at #seoweek), I'm sharing a light version of a report I spent many weeks manually putting together.

The full downloadable report is at the beginning of the post. :)

My intention is to find the answer to what us SEOs/AI Opportunists seem to be arguing about on here. (LLMs as search engines and user adoption rate).

If you know me well personally (e.g. Renee Girard/Tony Van Hart/Steve Kroll/Lauren Keepers/Tamara Hellgren), you know my take on this, but my take is not important. The data is.

First. My goal is to help take emotion out what's going on at a high level in search to level set us. I'm a community-focused collaborator NOT an opportunist.

Second. I welcome any constructive conversation. Have different data? Let's dialogue. Disagree? Please tell me what I'm not seeing. Have different methods/interpretations? Yes, let's figure this out together. If you wanna tell me to get bent, go for it, but that's mean.

Third. Some of what I've been seeing here on LinkedIn lately have been cherry-picked metrics to defend or dispute a hot take or to promote a tool/service/data provider. But also, please don't bucket me in with influencers/fear-mongers. I am not your opposition.

What The Data Says

Here’s what 13 months of U.S. clickstream data (Mar 2024–Mar 2025) shows for Google/OpenAI. Again, this is data-first, and did my best to exhibit transparency in all 26 pages.

• Google's audience is almost 7X the size of ChatGPT. BUT ChatGPT is over 2X more likely to send traffic to external websites than Google.
• Important note: to those saying that those websites are all to a handful of websites (and I've seen a few of these posts on LinkedIn over recent days)... it's NOT much different than Google. Check page 21 for where 64% of ChatGPT off-platform clicks go to.

The read is Google delivers the MOST TRAFFIC, but keeps MORE CLICKS within platform. ChatGPT, though notably smaller, sends out web visitors MORE OFTEN.

<div class="post-note-cute">Note of transparency: I am using Similarweb for this data. I am NOT being compensated (actually, I'm a satisfied customer). I moved on from other popular providers early this year after six months of testing different clickstream products against 1st party data I had access to. It was the closest (+/-10% on average, though sometimes up to +/-30%).</div>

Also, a special shoutout for Baruch Toledano for always taking time to have meaningful conversations when we cross paths.

I'll continue to share what I see if there's value in it for the SEO community. Want to contribute? HMU.