AI chatbot traffic surges 80% YoY but trails traditional search engines like Google: report

As per a report on internet site visitors traits by OneLittleWeb, AI chatbots have seen a major surge in site visitors, with an 81 p.c progress between April 2024 and March 2025, equalling almost 55.2 billion visits, up from 30.5 billion within the previous yr.

ChatGPT by OpenAI continued to steer the pack when it comes to complete visits, at 47.7 billion, adopted by DeepSeek far behind at 1.7 billion, Gemini at 1.7 billion, Perplexity at 1.3 billion, and Claude at 1.2 billion throughout the identical interval.

DeepSeek’s climb to the second place is noteworthy, because the Chinese language firm solely had 1.5 million guests between April 2023 and March 2024.

AI chatbots could have seen a large surge in visits on-year, however they proceed to path behind search engine site visitors, the place traction remained largely steady. The highest 10 engines like google courted 1.86 trillion visits between April 2024 and March 2025, a marginal drop of 0.5 p.c year-on-year (YoY).

Google led, with 1.63 trillion visits, down barely by 1.41 p.c on-year, adopted by Microsoft Bing at 60.1 billion visits, Russia’s Yandex at 41.5 billion, and Yahoo at 41.3 billion.

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The report attributes Google’s slight decline in visits to its AI-powered options, like AI-generated summaries, conversational search, and enhanced search outcomes. Microsoft Bing, after embracing AI integrations by way of its partnership with OpenAI, has seen regular progress in its search engine market share.”AI chatbots will not be changing conventional engines like google however reshaping how we work together with data. Whereas AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Grok and DeepSeek are seeing spectacular progress, their site visitors remains to be solely a fraction of search engine site visitors. Regardless of a slight decline in search engine visits, platforms like Google and Bing are bouncing again, integrating AI options similar to Search Generative Experience (SGE) and AI Overviews,” Sujan Sarkar, cofounder of OneLittleWeb, mentioned.

GenAI corporations have been positioning themselves as opponents to Google Search. OpenAI launched its search option in October last year, and rolled it out for all, even these with out signups, in February to “make search nice once more”, as CEO Sam Altman put it. Billionaire Elon Musk has additionally been asking folks to seek for solutions on his AI company xAI’s bot Grok, instead of Google.