Will AI Search Put Google Out of Business?

The search marketing landscape has been rapidly changing over the past few years. A new way of searching is beginning to emerge, search queries are being replaced with prompts and there is a new way of finding information.

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini are just some of the Large Language Models (LLM) which use AI (artificial intelligence) to find the information searchers are seeking. We have all used the phrase ‘Google it’ but as our search behaviour changes will we all be doing less ‘Googling’ ?

According to Statista, as of March 2025 this year, Google accounted for nearly 80% (79.1%) of the world’s online search market on desktop devices, continuing its domination of the market which has persisted since its launch at the end of the 1990s.

For its part, long-term competitor Bing commanded 12.21% of the market, and has made notable progress in terms of increasing its share in recent months. Meanwhile, Yahoo and Yandex each had shares above 2.9%, again as of March 2025.

Google, makes most of its’ money from pay per click (PPC) campaigns on their Google Ads platform – the paid ads which appear at the top of the search results. In 2024, their earnings totalled $348.16bn which is one of the biggest tech company incomes.

A report from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, shows most devices and browsers come with a default search engine, typically Google, so many users simply use this without thinking there could be an alternative, which is part of what makes Google so powerful.

What is ChatGPT Search?

ChatGPT Search is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It combines traditional search engine features with generative pretrained transformers to generate responses which include citations to external websites.

It was launched in July 2024 before being rebranded in October and is now on course to take 1% of the global search market.

Rather than browsing web pages, AI solutions use artificial intelligence to understand the intent and context behind someone’s query or ‘prompt’. The tools provide relevant results by rapidly analysing data from various sources and creating unique summaries. But while these are powerful, they can’t entirely replace the breadth and depth of Google’s search engine capabilities.

So the likes of ChatGPT aren’t Google – and indeed differ from it in several key ways:

1. AI search is activated by prompts – not keywords or search queries
2. ChatGPT Search relies on real-time web-based searches through third-party engines (currently Bing)
3. It supplies answers combining search results with natural language processing (NLP) and machine-learning models to answer the user’s question directly – for their part, regular search engines match keywords and phrases and look for particular words and phrases which show up in a site’s content.
4. ChatGPT Search is not yet a general-purpose homepage, nor does it claim to be one.

What both AI and Google search have in common is that lots of relevant, high-quality content is the key to performing well in the search results.

So while there’s no denying that AI search is growing at pace, it hasn’t yet come close to replacing Google. In fact, many AI search platforms still depend on established engines such as Google or Bing to power their own results.

AI solutions are constantly evolving and user behaviour is still developing and adapting to this new way of information seeking. Many users of AI-based tools are engaging with the summaries generated, and proceeding to click on the links within the text. For some brands, this has boosted sales and traffic. But for others there has been an increase in impressions and decrease in clicks as the information being sought is presented to the searcher on the screen.

At Google’s Marketing Live in Madrid, in April 2025, Google encouraged SEO specialists to stick to their current optimisation strategies. Emphasising that good E-A-T content is still the basis of strong exposure and no , and said no special tweaks were needed to take account of AI features.

How to measure AI traffic?

At the moment, visitors from LLMs are being recorded under Referrals in Google Analytics. We have created a specific AI Traffic report for a number of our clients so this traffic along with leads and sales can be easily seen.

Also from June 2025, Google’s AI Mode now counts toward the totals which are seen in the Search Console Performance report.

How do I attract more AI traffic to my website?

For now the same optimisation fundamentals which apply to traditional search also apply to LLM. Ensuring your great quality content can be indexed and accessed easily by the bots which are visiting your website.

So what’s next for Google?

Given Google’s current dominance of the market, and the shift we are seeing LLM engines. Google needs to find away to compete with the new kids on the block while still enjoying the revenue the ads.

We have already seen a number of changes in the Google search results with the Google AI Overview at the top of the results, followed by the ads and then the organic.

Due to this change a number of high ranking organic websites are seeing search impressions improve but clicks decrease as users find the answer in the AI summary and don’t need to visit the website.

At present enquires and purchases can’t be made through the AI summaries and that still requires searchers to visit your website, so making sure there is good reason to visit your website is still key!

We’ll happily discuss Google and ChatGPT Search with you as part of your broader digital marketing strategy. Get in touch today and book your free SEO health check or PPC campaign review.