Home Innovation Chatbots AI Chatbots Gaining Popularity...

AI Chatbots Gaining Popularity, Search Engines Still Reign

Chatbots

Business Honor
13 May, 2025

AI chatbots are quickly emerging as search tools but still lag far behind conventional search engines in total web traffic and user interaction.

AI chatbots are becoming popular as a replacement for conventional search engines, with increasing worldwide users accessing them for information. Yet, while they've seen remarkable growth, chatbots currently represent just a fraction of total web search traffic.

A latest report by SEO consultancy firm OneLittleWeb indicates that the top 10 AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini experienced an 80.92% increase in traffic year on year between April 2023 and March 2025—registering 55.2 billion visits. But this is only 2.96% of the search engine traffic it gets in the same period.

With a market share of 86.32% OpenAI's ChatGPT is at the forefront of chatbot companies, earning some stiff competition from new entrants such as DeepSeek and xAI's Grok. AI chatbots in March 2025, despite being among the most popular, attracted an average of only 233.1 million daily visits, while search engines such as Google and Bing received 5.5 billion visits per day. That is nearly a 24-fold difference.

The rapid adoption of AI chatbots has been disruptive. Apple's Eddy Cue testified recently that Safari's search traffic fell for the first time in 22 years, attributing the rise of AI tools. Nevertheless, Google still holds a commanding lead in the market of search and is incorporating AI-powered features to remain relevant.

While chatbots are advancing very fast, another study also indicated that news sites receive 96% fewer referral traffic from AI search engines to traditional ones—a headache for content publishers as well as advertisers.

The report suggests that while AI-powered chatbots are changing the manner in which humans interact with content on the internet, search engines have a long way to go before they are replaced. However, their expansive growth indicates that they will be an unstoppable force in the future of searching the internet.