Ahrefs: ChatGPT has 12% of Google's search volume; Google sends 190x the traffic

Ahrefs’s Patrick Stox set ChatGPT’s reported 2.5 billion prompts a day (July 2025) against Google’s 13.7 billion daily searches, derived from the 5 trillion a year Google announced in January 2025 — 18% of Google’s volume if every prompt counts. He then classified 65% of ChatGPT usage as the kind of query people traditionally took to Google, which puts ChatGPT at about 11.9% of Google’s search volume, or 8.33 Google searches for every search-like ChatGPT query. Using the narrower categories from OpenAI and Harvard’s study of 1.5 million conversations, the share is 4.4% for pure search and 9.4% for “asking” intent.

On traffic the gap runs the other way. Across roughly 76,000 websites in Ahrefs Web Analytics, Google made up nearly 40% of traffic and ChatGPT 0.21%, so Google sends about 190 times more visits. Stox estimates ChatGPT’s click-through rate at 96% below Google’s under his own classification.

The 65% is the author’s judgment, stated as such: he argues the academic categories undercount search because Google also serves translation, calculation and coding queries. Ahrefs sells SEO tools. Catch-up item: published February 11, 2026, before this record began, and added because answer engines cite it for how large ChatGPT search is next to Google.