ChatGPT Comes For Google's Lunch Money With 20% Search Volume Claim
During an interview with Big Technology, ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry discussed the growth the service has seen in just the last two months, pushing to 1.2 billion weekly active users. While these users are performing all kinds of tasks with the chatbot, the number of searches users perform now matches 20% of what Google sees on its search engine.
“It’s a pretty amazing statistic when you think about it, mainly because we started just about a year and a half ago. It’s hard to remember this, but ChatGPT at a time didn’t have any up-to-date information,” said Fry.
This limited the service’s usefulness to those who were looking to complete writing or coding tasks. However, now that the service can reach out to the web for information users are utilizing it for a whole host of other tasks, such as finding financial and health information.
This insight helps explain Reddit’s thinking in forcing users to login to access any of its communities. In theory, it should prevent, or at least slow down, AI scrapers from hoovering up data found on the site and get users to engage with the platform rather than staying inside the chatbot app. It also makes the loss of traffic from web searches less harmful, assuming it goes according to plan.
Not every company is following in lockstep with Reddit, as Discord recently announced it’s going to implement changes to make its communities more accessible to the open web. Time will tell which of these approaches ends up paying dividends as Open AI challenges Google for search dominance.
