Chatbots vs. Search Engines: Who Will Win the Traffic War?
Key Summary • Google's market dominance : Google maintains first place with 163.15 billion visits (87.6%) out of 186.3 billion visits to all search engines. • ChatGPT dominates the chatbot market : Of the 5.52 billion visits to AI chatbots, ChatGPT accounted for 4.77 billion visits (86.5%). • 34x Traffic Gap : Search engines will have 34x more visitors than AI chatbots (as of March 2025) • Recession vs. Growth : Search engines decreased by 0.51% year-over-year, while AI chatbots increased by 2.98%. • Monthly traffic change : ChatGPT increased by 75%, from 400 million to 700 million monthly averages. Search engine market: Google holds 87.6% share Analysis of data from April 2024 to March 2025 revealed that the total number of visits to search engines worldwide reached 186.3 billion. Google accounted for 87.6% of the total with 163.15 billion visits, followed by Microsoft Bing with 6.01 billion visits (3.2%), and Yahoo with 3.7 billion visits (2.0%). Russia's Yandex recorded 4.13 billion searches, while China's Baidu recorded 2.41 billion. However, these two platforms only accounted for 2.2% and 1.3% of Google's market share, respectively. Notably, the 0.51% year-on-year decrease in overall search engine traffic is a sign that users are reducing their use of search engines. Monthly data shows that search engine traffic remains stagnant at between 15 and 16 billion requests per month, with a clear downward trend since the second half of 2024. AI Chatbot Market: ChatGPT Dominates 86.5% The AI chatbot market recorded a total of 5.52 billion visits, with OpenAI's ChatGPT dominating the market with 4.77 billion visits (86.5%). Microsoft Copilot came in second with 920 million visits (16.7%), and Google Gemini third with 170 million visits (3.1%). Perplexity and Claude ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, with 130 million and 120 million visits. ChatGPT's monthly visitors increased by 125%, from 310 million in April 2024 to 700 million in March 2025, with a particularly sharp increase from January 2025. The overall AI chatbot market grew by 2.98% year-over-year, contrasting with the negative growth of search engines. Monthly traffic is expected to nearly double, from 3.4 billion requests in the second half of 2024 to 6.7 billion requests in early 2025 . Traffic Comparison: 34x Difference, But the Gap Is Closing As of March 2025, total search engine traffic (16.37 billion requests) was 34 times that of AI chatbots (700 million requests). However, this gap is steadily narrowing. In April 2024, search engines generated 15.5 billion requests, while AI chatbots generated 310 million requests, a 50-fold difference. However, within a year, this gap narrowed to 34 times. Specifically, while search engines stagnated at an average of 15.5 billion monthly requests, AI chatbots saw a 133% increase, from 300 million to 700 million. Notably, the 10-15% monthly increase in AI chatbot traffic through 2025 is evidence that users are beginning to prefer conversational, question-and-answer formats over simple keyword searches. By major platform, Google searches remained stagnant at 13.6 billion monthly searches, while ChatGPT grew from 300 million to 700 million monthly searches. Bing searches remained steady at 500 million monthly searches, but Copilot grew 50%, from 60 million to 90 million monthly searches. Future Outlook: The gap is expected to narrow tenfold within two years. If current growth rates continue, the traffic gap between search engines and AI chatbots is expected to narrow to less than tenfold by 2027. If ChatGPT achieves 2 billion monthly traffic and all AI chatbots achieve 2.5 billion monthly traffic, they could grow to 15% of search engine traffic.