Google Gets About Five Times the Searches of ChatGPT, OpenAI Says: What the Research and Data Show

OpenAI has put a rough number on how much people search inside ChatGPT, and Google comes out about five times ahead. Adam Fry, ChatGPT's consumer product lead, said the assistant gets roughly one-fifth as many search-like queries as Google, as reported by Search Engine Journal.

Fry spoke with Alex Kantrowitz of Big Technology during an open discussion at a dinner OpenAI hosted in New York on Monday evening. Big Technology posted the full text of the transcript on Tuesday.

How OpenAI counts web browsing as search

OpenAI counts a search each time a question sends ChatGPT to the web. Kantrowitz asked whether a conversation with several web lookups counts as one search or several. Fry replied: "Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search." So the unit is each time ChatGPT needs access to the web, not each chat.

Fry said people first came to ChatGPT mostly for writing and coding tasks they would not have searched for. Over the past year, they have added questions about people, places and things that need up-to-date information. That kind of question needs newer knowledge than the GPT models behind ChatGPT were trained on.

Finance and health questions have grown too, and for all of these ChatGPT runs a web search. He described the category as anything users would once have taken to a traditional search engine.

What the ChatGPT figure leaves out

Fry did not say which Google figure he used, what period the comparison covers or which regions it includes. The article notes those gaps, and they make the ratio hard to set against other estimates. Big Technology's report adds that weekly active users of ChatGPT grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion over a two-month window.

How it compares with previous estimates

An earlier Ahrefs estimate from February used another definition of search and put ChatGPT below a fifth of Google's volume. Its research started from 2.5 billion daily ChatGPT prompts, a count taken from a study by Harvard University and OpenAI. Ahrefs judged that most of them were the kind of query people once looked up on Google. It then set that against the more than 5 trillion searches a year Google had announced.

The Ahrefs author said that share was higher than the one the researchers had classified as search. That method sorts prompts by the kind of request, while Fry's figure counts web searches. The two methods rest on different ideas of a search, so they produce different numbers and neither confirms the other.

Referral data tells a different story. Ahrefs tracks where visits come from across sites that use its free Web Analytics tool. In October, Google sent about a quarter of all tracked traffic while ChatGPT sent a tiny share, according to the tracker's 3 November update.

Google's own numbers come as a rate rather than a count. In Alphabet's third-quarter release, CEO Sundar Pichai said investment in artificial intelligence is driving overall search query growth. He added that Google's year-over-year query growth rate is the highest it has been in the last five years.

Content and reporting steps for Dubai businesses

None of these numbers shows whether ChatGPT searches are replacing Google searches. For businesses in the UAE, the safest reading of the referral data is that Google still sends far more visitors. ChatGPT is growing as a place to ask questions, so expand your effort there without pulling it away from Google.

If ChatGPT sits in your channel plan, report query volume and referral traffic as two separate metrics. Document the definition next to each one, because the two measure different things. Build a custom report of referrals to your own domain from Google and ChatGPT, with a scheduled monthly review against Ahrefs' tracker.

Ask new leads where they first looked for you, too. Their feedback fills in what referral reports leave out, such as a buyer who asked ChatGPT and then searched your name on Google. Treat those answers as input for your content plan.

Then look at your content. Fry said the questions that send ChatGPT to the web are those that need up-to-date information. Keep the pages that answer those questions in your field current, in each language your customers use.

Your team can test this on any of the versions of ChatGPT it has, including ChatGPT Enterprise. Ask the questions your customers ask and note which sites the answers cite. For the wider picture of how brands appear in chatbot answers, read our guide to AI search visibility.

Paid placement is another route, and Adnika already runs ChatGPT campaigns for clients in Dubai as a ChatGPT Ads agency.

For our clients, that monthly review happens in one place. The Adnika Dashboard: one live view of a client's ads, analytics and CRM data, with AI recommendations reviewed by the strategist. A client comparing Google with ChatGPT sees visits from each source beside ad results and CRM leads.

Treat the one-fifth ratio with care in your search strategies until OpenAI says which Google figure it used. If you want help setting up that reporting and the content plan behind it, talk to our AI agency in Dubai.