Peeling "search" off Google's marquee is becoming muscle memory for more and more people. A Pew Research Center survey this summer found that getting information is now the most common use of AI among U.S. adults—42% of respondents admitted to using AI to search for things, and among employed people, 38% use it for work tasks, while entertainment, reading news, and asking for medical advice account for much smaller shares. And among all chatbots, ChatGPT is the "go-to" gateway for the masses: 44% of U.S. adults have used it, while second-place Gemini sits at just 24%.
Fry confirms it himself: the gap has shrunk from "zero" to "20 percent"
Just how big is this opening? Adam Fry, ChatGPT's consumer product lead, gives a hard number: search-like queries on ChatGPT now amount to roughly 20% of Google's search volume. That means the "input box" that Google once monopolized is quietly losing one-fifth of its attention to AI conversations.
Take the long view, and this battle is far from over. Last year, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai poured "cold water" on the idea: although chatbots have gathered hundreds of millions of users, Google search volume is still growing, and the two sides are "far from a zero-sum game"—he drew an analogy to TikTok, noting that YouTube still grew after short video took off. In other words, AI search is competing for incremental mindshare, not simply swallowing Google's pie. But now that ChatGPT has already taken a 20% bite, the old order of the search market is clearly starting to loosen.
