ChatGPT isn’t eating Alphabet’s lunch

For all the hype around OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which released a live web search function to compete with Alphabet’s Google last fall, way fewer people are using it than Google, according to a new report from Bank of America Global Research. While ChatGPT leads among AI competitors, including Google’s Gemini, it only makes up a tiny fraction of the traffic Google gets.

To wit: in January, daily global web traffic to Google was down 1% year over year to 2.7 billion. That same month, ChatGPT traffic was up 148% to 128 million.

Here’s what traffic looked like on ChatGPT, Bing, and Gemini:

And here’s that same chart, but adding in Google:

As BofA put it, “AI based engines do not appear to be materially impacting Google search traffic or share, but could be capturing a healthy share of incremental AI driven activity.”