The showdown between AI chatbots vs search engines has become the tech industry’s favourite myth—an existential battle framed as the inevitable disruption of search. ChatGPT and its generative ilk were meant to render traditional search obsolete. Just type your question, get a neat, human-like response, and never visit a web page again.
But while the idea of replacing Google with a chatbot might feel seductive, the actual data tells a different story—one that tech evangelists tend to ignore.
According to a new analysis from OneLittleWeb, traffic to AI chatbots exploded by 80.92% between April 2024 and March 2025, reaching a not-insignificant 55.2 billion visits. Leading the pack is ChatGPT, which now commands 86.32% of all chatbot visits. That’s a big jump, and it confirms what we already feel anecdotally: AI assistants are no longer a niche curiosity.
But while everyone’s busy declaring the search engine dead, Google casually racked up 1.63 trillion visits in the same period. Let that sink in: search engines collectively generated 34 times more traffic than all AI chatbots combined. ChatGPT might be growing faster, but it’s still not replacing anything. It’s just… supplementing.
The Google illusion
There’s a kind of narrative convenience to imagining AI chatbots as the next step in digital evolution. For years, Google has shaped how we access, monetise, and manipulate information. Its dominance has come under fire from regulators, publishers, and even users. So when a new interface came along, powered by AI and unconstrained by the rules of search engine optimisation, it felt like a fresh start.
Except it isn’t. Because as much as chatbots can generate slick, conversational responses, they’re still trained on content that lives on the open web. Most of them can’t browse or cite sources natively. Their answers often reflect a statistical average of what’s been said before, not a curated or verified truth. In other words, they’re built on the very system they’re supposedly replacing.
And users seem to know that. Daily traffic to Google is sitting at 4.7 billion visits. For ChatGPT, it’s about 185.2 million. That’s a 26x gap, and it hasn’t closed despite all the AI hype.
Numbers vs narratives
Let’s break the traffic down further:
| Platform | Apr 2024 – Mar 2025 | Avg. Monthly Visits | Avg. Daily Visits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.63 trillion | 136.0 billion | 4.7 billion | |
| ChatGPT | 47.7 billion | 4.0 billion | 185.2 million |
Yes, chatbot usage is growing. The top 10 AI chatbots went from 30.5 billion to 55.2 billion visits in just one year. That’s no small leap. But compare that to the 1.86 trillion visits racked up by the top 10 search engines, which only dipped 0.51% year-over-year. Search remains the dominant architecture of the web.
We’re not watching a revolution. We’re watching an integration.
What happens next?
What the AI chatbots vs search engines conversation really reveals is a deeper shift in how we expect to interact with information. Search is fast, expansive, and link-driven. Chatbots are intimate, confident, and often wrong. People use them for different things. And when chatbots hallucinate—or when they plagiarise without sourcing—it reinforces that they aren’t a replacement for search, but a reflection of its flaws.
So, no, ChatGPT isn’t coming for Google’s throne. At least not yet. What it’s doing is reframing user expectations around how answers are delivered. If anything, that might push search engines to evolve, not disappear.