🤔 How serious is Google’s ChatGPT problem?

AI answers are draining clicks—and dollars—from the web’s long-time gatekeeper.

Two years ago, I argued that Alphabet, which owns Google, faced a “GPT Tidal Wave” because “the start page of the Internet is shifting further from the browser and Google.com, replacing dozens or more Web searches each day. ChatGPT is preferable to open multiple tabs from a Google search and continuously backtracking.”

I’m an early adopter. Early adopters are either canaries in the coal mine or we’re wrong. Two years on, the data are starting to suggest we’re right. Slides from the investment firm Coatue circulated last week, showing what many of us sense anecdotally: once you adopt ChatGPT, you use Google less.

Across a still-short observation window, heavy ChatGPT users have cut Google’s page views by about 8% a year. That may feel mild, yet if the 800 million ChatGPT users today grow—plausibly—to three billion within three years, and if the search deficit holds, Google’s core business could shrink by a fifth, lopping tens of billions of dollars off annual revenue.

In truth, that is the bullish scenario for Google. ChatGPT is fast becoming the generic verb for “finding stuff,” and its advantage widens on difficult queries—which may be the very ones that anchor Google’s pricing power. The products will only get better at serving users’ needs, so that 8% figure could rise.

Fresh data from Britain’s competition watchdog, the CMA, reinforce the picture. For long-form questions, 17% of Britons already default to ChatGPT; they still turn to Google for simple, local, “tree-surgeon-near-me” look-ups. We do not yet know where the money lies—complex, ad-light queries or transactional, ad-heavy ones—but user behavior rarely plateaus.

I’ve highlighted a couple of important factors in yellow. Once someone becomes an “AI user,” AI starts to eat into complex and shopping queries.

Personally, my use of ChatGPT has snowballed. It not only cannibalizes my Google and Wikipedia time but also coaxes me to ask questions I once deemed too fiddly to type into a search box. Digital history’s graveyard—who kept both MySpace and Facebook profiles running for long?—shows that once a superior interface hits critical mass, dual loyalties fade fast. Usage, in other words, accelerates away from the incumbent.

Mountain View’s gambit

Google is not standing idle. Its AI Overviews now headline many results pages, and Gemini already serves roughly 400 million monthly users (according to Similarweb). And as the table shows, month-on-month growth is scorching.

That is serious traction and a textbook example of an incumbent launching a product that partially competes with its own cash cow.

Kudos. Yet the manoeuvre muddles incentives: every query answered by Gemini inside Google’s walls is one not monetised by the traditional ads-against-links model.