ChatGPT vs Google finally has a number from OpenAI itself. At a dinner OpenAI hosted in New York, ChatGPT's consumer product lead, Adam Fry, told Big Technology's Alex Kantrowitz that "ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google." Big Technology published the transcript on Nov. 3, 2026.
It's a big claim, and it's being shared everywhere as "ChatGPT is a fifth of Google." Before you change your plans around it, look at what is being counted.
How OpenAI counts a search
Fry's definition: "Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search." So:
- Every question that sends ChatGPT to the web counts, including several in one conversation.
- It counts what ChatGPT looks up, not what the user does next. A search here doesn't mean anyone clicked through to a website.
Big Technology also reported that ChatGPT's weekly users grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in about two months.
What the number leaves out
Fry didn't say which Google figure he compared against, what time period the comparison covers, or which countries it includes. Google doesn't publish a current query count either; Alphabet's latest results only said query growth is the fastest in five years.
The definitions also don't match. One user question in ChatGPT can trigger several web searches, while a Google query is one typed search. So "one fifth" is a rough comparison of two different things.
Is ChatGPT replacing Google for traffic?
Not yet, judging by referrals. Ahrefs' traffic tracker for October, across 118,671 websites, put Google at 24.74% of tracked traffic and ChatGPT at 0.36%, as reported by Search Engine Journal. Earlier, Ahrefs estimated ChatGPT's search volume at about 12% of Google's, using its own method.
Both can be true at once. People ask ChatGPT a lot of questions, but ChatGPT answers most of them itself, so far fewer of those searches turn into visits to websites.
What to measure on your own site
The headline ratio won't tell you what ChatGPT means for your business. These will:
- Referral traffic: in Google Analytics 4, look at sessions from chatgpt.com and the other AI assistants. We showed how in Does Google Analytics show ChatGPT traffic?
- Citations: ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, with web search on, and note whether your site is cited and which page.
- Branded search on Google: people who find you in an AI answer often search your name on Google next. A rise in branded impressions in Search Console can be AI exposure you won't see as a ChatGPT referral.
Our view
ChatGPT is now a real place where people look things up, and being cited there is worth working on. But for most sites Google still sends the large majority of visits. Plan for both, and judge ChatGPT by your own referral and citation data, not a ratio from a dinner conversation.
