Are you
convinced that
SEO is dead?
Are you
convinced that
SEO is dead?
“The SEO killer” is a nickname ChatGPT has picked up on various forums. Many have predicted that search engine optimization is on its way out. The numbers point the other way. Google searches grew by more than 20 percent in 2024, and in the second quarter of 2026 AI tools still accounted for under 2 percent of desktop visits in both the US and Europe.
By Marius Vestlien Hansen
SEO/SEM Lead, Maverix
marius@maverix.no
Google is still growing strongly
The assumption was simple. The more people use ChatGPT, the less they search on Google. SparkToro data shows the opposite: The number of Google searches grew by more than 20 percent in 2024.
This surprises no one who looks at traffic sources regularly. Open Google Analytics, Piwik PRO or Adobe Analytics, and the AI chatbots are there, but far down the list.
Google versus ChatGPT
The difference is large:
Google: 14 billion searches per day
ChatGPT: 37.5 million search-like prompts per day
Google therefore gets 373 times as many searches as ChatGPT. Add up ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Gemini, and together they account for under 2 percent of the search market.
Google has over 93 percent of searches
This is how searches are split between the search engines and ChatGPT:
Google: 93.57 percent
Bing: 4.10 percent
Yahoo: 1.35 percent
DuckDuckGo: 0.73 percent
ChatGPT: 0.25 percent
Why AI still gets so much attention
ChatGPT is largely used for things other than classic search. Semrush found that 70 percent of prompts fall outside the four usual search intents (informational, navigational, commercial and transactional), and placed them in an “unknown” category. Semrush points to creative work, conversation and problem solving as possible purposes.
Even so, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and AIO (AI Optimization) have become buzzwords, also in our own industry. The discussion is useful as long as it builds on numbers. Without numbers, it mostly creates uncertainty among customers.
What affects visibility in AI answers?
Seer Interactive has studied what determines whether a brand is mentioned in AI answers.
Websites on the first page of Google are strongly linked to being mentioned in AI answers, with a correlation of around 0.65.
Links from other websites matter surprisingly little.
Images, video and other content types matter less than expected.
The study should be taken with a pinch of salt. It still points the same way: What earns high rankings in Google also appears to earn visibility in AI tools.
What the numbers look like in 2026
Datos and SparkToro have followed searches further. In the report for the second quarter of 2026, published on 27 July, search engines accounted for 10.52 percent of all visits in Datos’ US desktop panel, against 1.83 percent for AI tools, according to eMarketer. In Europe, AI tools made up 1.91 percent of desktop activity, according to Marketing4eCommerce. The share is still growing.
In the report for the first quarter of 2026, the share in the EU and UK nearly doubled in 14 months, from 0.54 percent in January 2025 to 1.08 percent in March 2026. Google accounted for 94.3 percent of desktop searches in the US in March, and 95.5 percent in the EU and UK in early 2026. In January, the same researchers reported that each US Google user searched nearly 20 percent less than a year earlier. By March the average was back at 102.5 searches per user, up from 95.3 in December.
Among AI tools, ChatGPT is still the largest. Gemini and Claude are growing fastest. Google’s own AI Mode accounts for 0.21 percent of desktop visits in the EU and UK, a small share that is growing fast.
One caveat: The figures apply to desktop. About two thirds of searches happen on mobile, which the report does not measure.
At the same time, AI Overviews take clicks from the regular results in Google. Read how to find the pages losing clicks to AI Overviews, and why Google is moving links higher up in AI Mode.
Sources: Datos and SparkToro, State of Search Q2 2026 (27 July 2026) and Q1 2026, via PPC Land (27 April 2026).
SEO is alive and well
Google searches grew by more than 20 percent in 2024, and in the second quarter of 2026 AI tools accounted for 1.83 percent of desktop visits in the US. AI tools are widely used, and Semrush found that 70 percent of ChatGPT prompts fall outside the usual search intents. That is how ChatGPT can be popular and still take a small share of the search market. For marketers, the advice is to prioritize SEO and use AI strategies as a supplement.
Read more
SEO
What role does AEO play for websites today?
Questions and answers about SEO and AI search
Is SEO dead?
How many searches does Google get compared with ChatGPT?
What is ChatGPT used for?
What affects whether a brand is mentioned in AI answers?
Should I prioritize SEO or AI optimization?
Want to know more about SEO?
