Between October 2022 and **********, the traffic volume for the keyword "AI" has tripled , going from around *** million monthly searches to more than **** million during the last month of the measured period. Interest in artificial intelligence has skyrocketed with the release of ChatGPT in *************. Quick adoption of AI-powered tools has already started shaking industries like the online search market with the trend of chatbots providing search results in a dialogue format, known as AI-powered search engines.

Between December 2022 and March 2023, the traffic volume for the keywords "ChatGPT plugin" has grown approximately ** times, going from around ***** monthly searches to more than ****** thousand during the last month of the analyzed period. Interest in artificial intelligence and its derived tools have spiked since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Nonetheless, the fast adoption of artificial intelligence-powered tools is already shaking industries like the online search market with the trend of AI-powered search engines.

Between June 2022 and March 2023, the traffic volume for the keyword "AI" has tripled, going from around 7.9 million monthly searches to more than 30.4 million during the last month of the measured period. General interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in markets like the United States by the end of 2022. Likewise, interest for the application programming interfaces (API's) and plugins of artificial intelligence solutions, especially those of ChatGPT, has also seen a major increase since the release of the tool in November of 2022.

The artificial intelligence market

Valued at around 142.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2022, the artificial intelligence market is one the most promising tech segments for the rest of the decade, with more than five billion U.S. dollars invested in startups - the most notable being the Californian company OpenAI and its flagship application ChatGPT. Disruptive as it is, the adoption of AI has already sparked an alert for several industries, likely to affect job markets and thus raising concerns about cybercrime and other online misdeeds.

The future of online search?

Of most industries, the impact of the new tool developed by OpenAI may be felt by the online search market like a global earthquake. With chatbots providing search results in a dialogue format, the trend of AI-powered search engines unleashed by ChatGPT threw giant companies like Google and Microsoft into a race with startups and other competitors to present the best candidate for this disruptive (and experimental) online solution.

A dataset of mentions, growth rate, and total volume of the keyphrase 'Chatgpt Search' over time.

As of June 2024, global Google searches for the word "ChatGPT" increased again after a slight decline by the end of 2024. Interest in the chatbot, developed by the U.S.-based OpenAI and launched in November 2022, started rising in the week ending December 3, 2022. Recently, growing demand for information on ChatGPT made the keyword hit a peak of 100 index points during the week ending on June 2, 2024. ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a chatbot and AI-powered auto-generative text system able to give human-sounding replies and reproduce human-like interactions when prompted.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, setting a record for the fastest app to reach a 100 million users, which it hit in two months. The implications of this tool are far-reaching, universities...

As of June 2024, global searches for the keyword "generative AI" had experienced an increase in the previous year. The search terms for generative artificial intelligence surged in popularity from mid-February to early March 2024, hitting a score of 100 index points in the week ending March 3. Interest in "generative AI" frequently coincides with searches for ChatGPT, an AI chatbot model developed by the United States-based research company OpenAI.

Google's dominance in the digital landscape remains unchallenged, as evidenced by the search engine's staggering ************* visits worldwide between April 2024 and March 2025. In contrast, ChatGPT received ************ visits over the same time period, despite its quick growth and dominance in artificial intelligence, representing around ** times less volume than the search giant.

As of March 2025, Google represented 79.1 percent of the global online search engine market on desktop devices. Despite being much ahead of its competitors, this represents the lowest share ever recorded by the search engine in these devices for over two decades. Meanwhile, its long-time competitor Bing accounted for 12.21 percent, as tools like Yahoo and Yandex held shares of over 2.9 percent each. Google and the global search market Ever since the introduction of Google Search in 1997, the company has dominated the search engine market, while the shares of all other tools has been rather lopsided. The majority of Google revenues are generated through advertising. Its parent corporation, Alphabet, was one of the biggest internet companies worldwide as of 2024, with a market capitalization of 2.02 trillion U.S. dollars. The company has also expanded its services to mail, productivity tools, enterprise products, mobile devices, and other ventures. As a result, Google earned one of the highest tech company revenues in 2024 with roughly 348.16 billion U.S. dollars. Search engine usage in different countries Google is the most frequently used search engine worldwide. But in some countries, its alternatives are leading or competing with it to some extent. As of the last quarter of 2023, more than 63 percent of internet users in Russia used Yandex, whereas Google users represented little over 33 percent. Meanwhile, Baidu was the most used search engine in China, despite a strong decrease in the percentage of internet users in the country accessing it. In other countries, like Japan and Mexico, people tend to use Yahoo along with Google. By the end of 2024, nearly half of the respondents in Japan said that they had used Yahoo in the past four weeks. In the same year, over 21 percent of users in Mexico said they used Yahoo.

The search terms "ai white collar jobs" had a yearly growth of 65,900 percent in U.S. search volume in January 2023, accumulating to 541 thousand searches in the country during that month. Interest in artificially powered tools like ChatGPT has spiked over the last months, as well as for its developing company OpenAI. Nonetheless, search query "open ai jobs" had a year-on-year growth in its average monthly volume of around 1,971.4 percent, reaching 546 thousand searches in January 2023.

A study released in June 2025 that looked at about 82,000 websites found that Google was responsible for almost ** percent of the traffic generated to these domains. Direct traffic corresponded to around **** percent of the investigated websites' traffic volume. While traditional search engines like Bing and social networks like Facebook represented larger shares, ChatGPT overtook Reddit and LinkedIn with a slightly larger share, indicating an increase in traffic from these platforms.

In November 2024, Google.com was the most popular website worldwide with 136 billion average monthly visits. The online platform has held the top spot as the most popular website since June 2010, when it pulled ahead of Yahoo into first place. Second-ranked YouTube generated more than 72.8 billion monthly visits in the measured period. The internet leaders: search, social, and e-commerce Social networks, search engines, and e-commerce websites shape the online experience as we know it. While Google leads the global online search market by far, YouTube and Facebook have become the world’s most popular websites for user generated content, solidifying Alphabet’s and Meta’s leadership over the online landscape. Meanwhile, websites such as Amazon and eBay generate millions in profits from the sale and distribution of goods, making the e-market sector an integral part of the global retail scene. What is next for online content? Powering social media and websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, user-generated content keeps moving the internet’s engines. However, the rise of generative artificial intelligence will bring significant changes to how online content is produced and handled. ChatGPT is already transforming how online search is performed, and news of Google's 2024 deal for licensing Reddit content to train large language models (LLMs) signal that the internet is likely to go through a new revolution. While AI's impact on the online market might bring both opportunities and challenges, effective content management will remain crucial for profitability on the web.