How Big is AI Search Compared to Google?
Chapter 2: How Big is AI Search Compared to Google? Understanding the Landscape
In this chapter we compare metrics of “traditional” search engines and AI-first engines like ChatGPT. This will help to see the increasing significance of AI search and what that means for overall visibility of websites.
Comparing Popularity of AI search engines to Google
Let’s see how most popular “traditional” and “AI native” search engines compares by monthly visitors:
| Search Engine | Est. Monthly Visitors | In % of total |
|---|---|---|
| 82.6 billion | 85.20% | |
| OpenAI ChatGPT | 5.9 billion | 6.09% |
| Microsoft Bing | 3.5 billion | 3.61% |
| Yahoo | 3.0 billion | 3.09% |
| DuckDuckGo | 691.9 million | 0.71% |
| Brave Search | 375.0 million | 0.39% |
| Deepseek* | 333.0 million | 0.34% |
| Grok (X.ai) | 191.9 million | 0.20% |
| Perplexity AI | 169.5 million | 0.17% |
| Anthropic Claude | 157.0 million | 0.16% |
| Poe | 15.1 million | 0.02% |
| Meta AI | 11.0 million | 0.01% |
Figure 2.1. Estimated monthly visits of leading AI sites and search engines (SimilarWeb: snapshot: Sep 2025)[^11]. * Deepseek visitors from US are estimated at only 6.52% (21.7 million), according to Similarweb[^12]
Let’s break down the numbers:
- AI-powered search is a significant force now, without a doubt anymore.
- Out of the few “native” AI engines, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is clearly the most popular one. According to research by SimilarWeb, ChatGPT accounts for more than 75% of the combined traffic to the top popular AI tools.[^13]
- Google’s AI-generated summaries (in “AI Overviews”) and fully powered conversations (in “AI Mode”) are touching a significant number of visitors because now they are showing on top of the “traditional” keyword based search results for more than 200 countries and territories[^14], supporting 40+ languages - a dramatic shift from the US-only rollout in 2024. Google also integrated AI-powered summaries into Google Discover (with about 2 billion users).[^15]
- ChatGPT’s Surge: ChatGPT has rapidly become a major player, not just as a chatbot, but as an information discovery tool. It accounts for almost 5% of Google.com’s traffic volume, a staggering figure![^16] Its growth is impressive and a fast month-over-month increase. Since 2024, ChatGPT doubled its traffic and, as of October 2025, had almost two times more monthly visitors than Yahoo!
Other Players Growing: Niche players like Perplexity AI and DeepSeek are also demonstrating significant growth. New players like Grok are also aggressively capturing their shares of the search market using their existing large userbases.
The Bottom Line: AI is already involved in a significant portion of online interactions with Google and ChatGPT leading the market. AI search isn’t just a future trend, it’s a rapidly evolving part of the present digital landscape.
