On November 4, according to the latest reports from foreign media, AI giant OpenAI has officially made a breakthrough in its effort to challenge traditional search giant Google. In a related interview, OpenAI consumer product lead Adam Fry publicly confirmed that search-type queries on the ChatGPT platform have now reached 20% of Google’s search query volume.
Looking at the broader industry context, the Pew Research Center released a detailed survey report this summer. The data showed that “searching for information” has become the most common AI use case among American adults, with as many as 42% of respondents having tried using AI to retrieve and find information. Work-related use followed at 38%, mainly for handling various workplace tasks. By contrast, entertainment, getting news, and seeking medical advice were relatively lower-ranked use cases.
It should be noted that the survey was not specifically about any one product. However, in terms of market penetration, ChatGPT still holds an absolute lead among major AI chatbots. Statistics show that 44% of surveyed American adults have used ChatGPT, while second-ranked Gemini accounted for 24%.
Amid increasingly fierce competition between AI tools and traditional search engines, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, previously shared his view in a media interview. He noted at the time that although chatbots have reached hundreds of millions of users, Google’s own search query volume is also continuing to grow, so this is far from a zero-sum game. He once used video streaming as an analogy: “After TikTok came along, everyone started using TikTok, but YouTube also kept growing during that time and performed very well.”
