Google vs AI: How Search Giants and Chatbots Are Reshaping Digital Marketing

The two-year analysis was conducted by OneLittleWeb agency, which drew from global SEMrush data spanning April 2023 to March 2025. They focused on the top 10 AI chatbots and top 10 search engines by web traffic volume, tracking both year-on-year and monthly trends.

Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and DeepSeek recorded a combined 55.2 billion visits between April 2024 and March 2025, representing 80.9% growth compared to the previous year. ChatGPT alone had an average of 185 million daily users in March 2025.

However, despite this growth, the proportions remain incomparable: traditional search engines had 1.86 trillion visits during the same period – that’s 34 times more than AI chatbots. Google maintains an 87.6% market share, whilst ChatGPT dominates amongst chatbots with an 86.3% share.

Chatbots are expanding rapidly, but they’re not knocking Google out of the game. Not yet.

Users utilise AI primarily for quick answers, whilst search engines are beginning to integrate it directly into their functionality. Google is investing massively in Search Generative Experience (SGE), Microsoft in Copilots and their integration with Bing search. These very integrations are why Google, after a minor decline in mid-2024, returned to a growth trajectory and recorded its highest figures in the past year in March 2025 – 163.7 billion monthly visits.

Smaller players are also leveraging AI for growth:

• Brave +64% YoY
• Naver +34%
• Bing +27%

Conversely, Yahoo declined 22.5%, clearly signalling that platforms without AI integration are losing relevance.

Whilst ChatGPT dominates the market by volume, the real story is unfolding among rapidly growing platforms such as:

• DeepSeek: 113,000% growth (1.7 billion visits)
• Grok: +350,000% (surpassed Copilot and Gemini in daily traffic)
• Perplexity and Claude: strong growth thanks to partnerships and professional tools
• Microsoft Copilot: over 1,000% growth thanks to integration into Windows, M365, and business tools

The difference isn’t in the technology but in the sources from which it draws. As we’ve previously highlighted, e-shops often underestimate one key aspect: AI only has value when it has something to draw from. Without quality content, structured data, and authoritative websites, no chatbot has anything to cite. And without that, a brand has no way to enter the user’s decision-making process – whether in an AI environment or in a traditional search engine.

What Does This Mean for E-commerce?

From the perspective of brands and e-shops, it’s not a dilemma of Google vs AI, but a battle for visibility in both environments simultaneously. If a brand isn’t in authoritative sources today, it doesn’t exist not only in Google, but also in responses from ChatGPT or Perplexity.

AI no longer just answers questions. It guides customers to purchase. More and more AI tools are answering questions that have direct commercial impact:

• “Best smartphones under £500”
• “What gift for the boss?”
• “Which brands make sustainable trainers?”

Does this sound like standard SEO queries? Yes. The difference, however, is that users today no longer need to click on Google and search for answers among ten results.

Perplexity, for example, is already testing direct links to e-shops – including the possibility of purchasing directly from the AI interface. This means that a brand that doesn’t make it into AI output isn’t in the game. Neither in organic search nor in purchasing decisions.

The study concludes that SEO isn’t dying. On the contrary – good SEO is a prerequisite for visibility in AI environments as well. Chatbots draw from Google or Bing indices, evaluate domain authority, content structure, and technical quality. All fundamental SEO disciplines thus remain crucial – it’s just their application context that’s changing.

AI vs Google search

The rapid rise of AI chatbots, which are beginning to answer commercially important questions and in some cases directly offer the purchasing process within the interface (e.g., Perplexity), places new demands on brands. It’s not enough to be optimised for Google. It’s not enough to have generally good content. E-commerce brands and marketing teams will need to reconsider how they approach visibility across channels.

In practice, this means three fundamental steps:

1. Don’t stop investing in content strategy Content remains the fundamental asset that determines whether a brand gets into AI tool responses as well as traditional search results. Quality, authority, and technical processing are decisive. The more comprehensive, structured, and relevant the content, the higher the chance that chatbots will include it in their responses.
2. Expand analytics to include sources from which AI outputs draw If AI tools use citations or links to specific websites, brands must know where they do (and don’t) appear. Perplexity and some other platforms allow you to see which websites responses draw from. This data can be key input for content strategy – helping identify new opportunities as well as weak spots.
3. Adapt content not only for Googlebot, but also for “AI crawlers” Just as optimisation for Googlebot was done in the past, today it’s necessary to consider how AI models perceive and evaluate content. This means working with structured data (schema.org), clearly marking entities, building trustworthy links, and ensuring that content is easily machine-readable and comprehensible. AI doesn’t read between the lines – it evaluates specific data structure.

The future doesn’t belong to one tool. It belongs to those brands that manage to optimise for both streams – for traditional search engines and for AI platforms. This requires a new way of thinking, expanded KPIs, but also the courage to reconsider where customers obtain information before purchase today.

Visibility today isn’t built just for search engines but also for AI. SEO is thus becoming the universal language of digital relevance.