Will ChatGPT Search Change How We Do SEO in 2025?

By now, most of you have probably heard the big news: OpenAI has made the ChatGPT Search feature available to all registered users.

According to new data from Search Engine Land, we’re seeing for the first time a growth trajectory where ChatGPT could surpass the 1% market share threshold as early as next year.

Why This Matters

AI-powered search is evolving rapidly, and many users are gradually changing their search habits, replacing an increasing number of Google queries with searches on ChatGPT or Perplexity. This explosive growth is already observable month after month. And with ChatGPT Search now available to all free users, the popularity of this tool is likely to accelerate.

ChatGPT vs. Perplexity

ChatGPT is currently six times larger than Perplexity, according to an analysis of LLM referral traffic for November. Additionally, search traffic from ChatGPT (up by 44%) and Perplexity (up by 71%) continues to grow month over month.

But…

Google remains the undisputed leader, accounting for 92.4% of referral traffic. Meanwhile, Microsoft Bing held a 4.2% market share in November.

And Another Thing..

You may have heard that Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, estimated ChatGPT’s search market share at 4.33% last month based on data from SimilarWeb and Datos (a Semrush company). However, he later revised this figure, noting that not every query or chat on ChatGPT can be considered a “search.”

So, if you’ve heard that ChatGPT holds 4% of the search market, you can safely disregard that figure as inaccurate.

So, What’s the Takeaway?

In our opinion, we are unlikely to see dramatic changes in 2025. SEO will still focus primarily on Google, as the share of queries going to LLMs remains very small. Moreover, it’s not yet clear how to influence the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT to promote specific products effectively.

By the way, we tested using the ChatGPT Search extension as our default search tool, and to be honest, it didn’t really click with us.
____________________

About the author

Artem Gladkikh
Founder & CEO, Signum.AI
Building The Ecosystem That Transforms Marketers Into AI-Driven Experts.

Linkedin | X