Although artificial intelligence is booming with the emergence of chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Search still maintains its dominance in the field of searching for information on the internet.
A new report from The Washington Post has clarified the reality behind the wave of chatbots as replacing traditional search engines.
Technology companies are increasingly integrating AI chatbot into their products, and users also tend to ask questions and look up information directly with tools like ChatGPT instead of typing keywords on Google.
This leads to the view that search behavior is changing and chatbots will be the future of search.
However, data from Similarweb analytics company shows a more realistic picture.
In the first 5 months of 2025, ChatGPT recorded about 25 million visits to news sites through its platform, a sharp increase compared to only about 1 million visits in the same period last year. Although this growth rate is impressive, this number is still too small when placed next to Google.
In the same period alone, users in the US made up to 9.5 billion visits to news sites through traditional search engines, mainly Google.
On average, for every ChatGPT-based news user, there are 379 people still using Google.
The report also cited data from parkToro CEO Rand Fishkin, saying users are currently performing about 14 billion searches per day on Google.
Meanwhile, the total number of similar searches (question-answer) on ChatGPT is only about 37.5 million per day, 373 times lower than Google.
However, the impact of chatbots is still gradually becoming clear. Google saw its global search engine market share drop below 90% for the first time since 2015 in the last quarter of 2024.
While it is not possible to fully explain the cause of AI chatbot, the rise of tools like ChatGPT is certainly a contributing factor.
ChatGPT and AI chatbots are accelerating strongly, gradually becoming a tool to support information lookup for millions of users.
But it is too early to say that they have replaced or disrupted Google Search.
Currently, Google is still the "king" of search, and chatbots are still in the process of shaping their role.
