ChatGPT Search Cuts Traditional Search 9.4%, Study Finds

Expanding access to ChatGPT Search significantly reduces traditional search engine use. A new study finds that traditional search queries dropped by 9.4% on average. This decline deepens to 17.0% after twenty weeks of exposure. What's interesting is how researchers at Bocconi University measured this. They looked at desktop clickstream data from over 45,000 U.S. households. The study, titled "Answering Without Referring: How AI Search Rewrites the Web's Economic Bargain," shows a shift in online behavior. The research also found that ChatGPT conversations led to an outside website only 5.2% of the time. This compares to 31.1% for Google queries. The bottom line is that AI search changes how people find information online, and this has implications for websites that rely on traditional search traffic.