ChatGPT claims to have achieved 20% of Google’s search volume. Is that true? And, more importantly, does it matter?

As reported by Gizmodo (ChatGPT Claims to Have Achieved 20% of Google’s Search Volume, written by AJ Dellinger and available here), according to a report from Big Technology, ChatGPT estimates that it has about 20% of the search volume that Google does, which, by most metrics, would make it the second-largest search engine in the world.

The article follows up with this statement: “how exactly it quantifies its metrics might give you pause.”

The metrics are quantified related to in an interview with Big Technology, where ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry revealed that OpenAI’s flagship product is “rapidly becoming Google-esque in size—which is the kind of thing that you’d want to say publicly ahead of a planned initial public offering.”

According to Gizmodo, “Fry’s way of quantifying this is with ‘search-like queries,’ which are kind of an eye-of-the-beholder thing. Fry described it as ‘basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for.’ Pressed for a little more specifics, he explained, ‘Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search.’”

As Dellinger states in the article: “Fry didn’t put a specific number on how many prompts ChatGPT is handling that qualify as search. But we can get a rough estimate: Google reportedly handles 16 billion searches per day, so ChatGPT is claiming to have about 3.2 billion similar user interactions. That’s believable enough, though it’s interesting that ChatGPT’s attempts to make actual Google-like products have kinda tanked. Remember SearchGPT, which was going to be a standalone search engine that just got rolled into ChatGPT? Or ChatGPT Atlas, the company’s Google Chrome-like browser that very quietly got put out to pasture earlier this year after generating very little user interest?”

As I noted in my post last week about TechCrunch’s “AI Graveyard”, pretty much every major company has had a notable miss in releasing an AI concept that didn’t work, including OpenAI, Apple and Microsoft.

Still, the question remains – has ChatGPT achieved the level of searching claimed by Fry in the interview? And does it matter?

I think it may matter – a lot. I’m hearing people more and more say they will “ask ChatGPT” about something to get an answer that they used to “Google” to get the answer. I’ve heard it in the past two weeks related to everything from how to get certain plants to survive in a specific climate to identifying recipes for casseroles to planning vacations and finding travel deals.

Last week at the Everlaw conference, I sent ChatGPT a picture of the expresso machine in the hotel room and asked how to use it and asked whether it would make good regular coffee. As I’m not an expresso fan, I ultimately learned that I was better off getting my coffee from the McDonalds around the corner from the hotel. I didn’t ask Google for that information. I asked ChatGPT.

One potential drawback of asking ChatGPT general questions is that it has learned so much about me that it wants to relate any question that I ask to eDiscovery. And while it’s true that eDiscovery professionals drink a lot of coffee (especially when trying to get out a production), I don’t need the answer about a specific coffee maker related to eDiscovery.

Regardless, the point is that internet searching doesn’t necessarily look like it used to look. Google became so ubiquitous that it literally became a verb – go “Google” this to find out the answer.

But, if AI teaches us anything, it’s that technology changes how we do things. It doesn’t necessarily matter that SearchGPT or ChatGPT Atlas failed. People are still using ChatGPT to find out answers to things that they used to use Google for – even when Google Search is now AI-based. I don’t know how accurate Fry’s claims are, but I know what I see – using AI models like ChatGPT to find answers to general questions is the same as “Googling” the answer and people are doing it more and more.

BTW, Fry also shared that users generate 1.5 billion images a week and 250 million use voice features weekly. Now you get the image above! 😉

So, what do you think? Are you buying into the fact that ChatGPT claims to have achieved 20% of Google’s search volume? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “robot excited to look at a computer workstation and see ‘1,500,000,001 images generated’”.

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