The State of Web Search and AI Today
Google is still the leader and traditional search is growing. There are 5 trillion searches on Google annually, and 14 billion searches on Google per day. Google’s Share of Total Website Referrals to websites is 44%. 95% of people that interact with ChatGPT also use Google Search, but only 15% of Google users use ChatGPT
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode adoption for Q2 2025 AI Overviews are shown for 18-22% of all search queries in the United States. When shown AI overviews users engage around 25% of the time before scrolling down to the traditional organic search results
ChatGPT is growing Weekly active users have grown from ~50 Million in January 2023 to ~800 Million in July 2025. Share of Total Website Referrals remained relatively flat at ~0.17% mid 2024 to ~0.19% through June 2025
Other traditional search, AI platforms to watch are Perplexity, Meta AI, Anthropic, Grok, Copilot and Gemini. These platforms all have their own web crawler/bot that indexes the web in a similar way to Googlebot.
Organic Social in Search and AI Citations is expanding. A recent study showed Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok among the top 100 cited domains in Google’s AI Mode, and recently Google began indexing Instagram content as well
Paid Advertising in search and social, with potential decreased organic traffic from web search and AI, Paid will become even more important to drive traffic. It may eventually come to more AI platforms as well as they look for ways to monetize beyond investor money
Apple with massive distribution through Siri and iPhone are rolling out a new version of Siri next year and is potentially partnering with Google to produce their own AI-Powered Web Search/Answer Engine for Siri to compete with OpenAI and Perplexity
SUMMARY
Google is still king in driving traffic through traditional search with total website referrals at 44%, and Google search ad spend, growing in Q2 2025 by 12% to $54.2 billion. ChatGPT is also growing with ~800 Million active users, and a volatile ~0.19% of total website referrals in July 2025.
ChatGPT along with AI Overviews in Google search is changing the (SEO) Search Engine Optimization game as we see significant changes in user behavior such as zero-click searches, and AI citations becoming as important as organic (CTR) Click-through rate.
It’s not just Googlebot crawling the web and indexing your web content. It’s GPTBot, MetaBot, and more. It’s early in the game for AI search and AI citations, so it’s important that your brand is not left behind in an ever changing, and evolving digital landscape.
How is AI Changing Search?
Get used to Zero click searches With AI Overviews and ChatGPT reducing clicks, “zero-click searches” are becoming common. Instead of focusing solely on clicks and ranking, we should now measure citations in AI answers, similar to how we track impressions
Websites are more important than ever as Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini need content for training and to answer questions. To boost visibility, become a helpful thought leader by answering questions through blogs, articles, videos, and podcasts
Authoritative social sources like YouTube and Reddit are increasingly appearing in search results and cited by AI. Brands should regularly post YouTube videos and Shorts, linking them on their websites. Brands should also have a helpful, non-promotional presence on Reddit, engaging with the community
E-E-A-T framework as a method for content creation moves from recommendation to strategic initiative (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) human experience and verifiable expertise is more valuable than ever in authentic content creation
Human + AI Human-led content creation with AI to support and enhance human creativity is the way to proceed so that you are not potentially producing the spam of the future that damages your brand. In Google’s own words: Using AI to assist in the creation of high-quality, original, and helpful content is perfectly acceptable. Using AI to programmatically generate low-quality, unoriginal content at scale for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings is a clear violation of its spam policies
SUMMARY
SEO is not dead, and content is more important than ever, but the rules of the game are being rewritten. We are moving into a new and exciting frontier of digital brand discovery. The new SEO that includes GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about creating authentic content with topical authority that focuses on answering human conversational queries. Many SEOs have wrongly focused on ranking in search as the primary measurement of success.
The future of search is to go beyond ranking, and grow your brand visibility and influence across disparate search platforms, answer engines, LLMs, and social utilities to get your brand noticed in the AI search driven attention economy
