There’s a particular kind of LinkedIn post doing the rounds again at the moment. “Google is dying. AI is taking over. If you’re not optimising for ChatGPT right now, your business is finished. Book my consultancy package and I’ll save you.”
It gets a lot of likes. It’s largely bollocks.
Rand Fishkin at SparkToro just published the most comprehensive search research I’ve seen in years. 41 sites, millions of devices, the whole of 2025 – Google, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, ChatGPT, everywhere people use to search. If you’ve been losing sleep over AI search, the findings are worth a few minutes of your time.
Why Google still dominates search despite what LinkedIn tells you
You’ll often see Google’s search market share quoted at 90% or above. The SparkToro research puts it at 73.7% of all desktop searches in the US in Q4 2025. In the UK and EU, it’s around 80%.
That drop sounds alarming until you understand what changed. Previous figures only ever counted traditional search engines. This research counted everywhere people search – Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, ChatGPT, the lot. When you include all of those, Google’s share looks smaller by comparison. But it’s still winning most of it, by a distance.
That 73.7% isn’t a sign of collapse. It’s a sign that search is happening in more places than it used to, and Google is still dominant across all of them.
All AI tools combined handle 3.2% of desktop searches
Not ChatGPT alone. Every AI tool – ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, Gemini, CoPilot, all of them together – adds up to 3.2% of desktop searches. And that’s before you factor in something the research flagged that rarely gets mentioned: only around half of people who visit ChatGPT use it to search or prompt anything at all. Many are simply clicking a link to a shared conversation. So the real figure is lower still.
Amazon, Bing and YouTube each individually have more search activity than ChatGPT. Three platforms SEO professionals have been working with for years. Quietly. Without the hysteria.
The person looking for a B2B PR agency in Poole, or a management consultant in Northampton, is not opening ChatGPT to find you. They’re using Google. The data is unambiguous about that.
Google AI Overviews are changing search – ChatGPT isn’t
This isn’t to say nothing is changing. Something is – just not what the panic merchants are selling.
Google itself is the largest AI search tool by a significant margin. Around 16% of its results already show AI Overviews. So the real story isn’t Google versus AI. It’s that Google is becoming more AI-influenced, which is a different and considerably less dramatic narrative than the one being pushed on LinkedIn.
That shift is worth understanding, but before you do anything drastic with your content strategy, the reality is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. The response to it, though, is the same as it’s always been – content that genuinely serves the person searching, on a website that’s technically sound. Nothing new to buy. Nothing to panic about. Yet.
What B2B businesses should focus on right now
The businesses rushing to pay for AI optimisation packages are solving a problem that, for most B2B service businesses, doesn’t really exist yet.
Meanwhile the things that have always worked are still working. Showing up for searches from people who are ready to hire someone. Giving them a clear reason to get in touch when they land on your site. If your website ranks for the wrong searches, or ranks well but doesn’t convert visitors into enquiries, no amount of AI optimisation fixes that. Sort the basics first. SEO, innit?
Where B2B buyers search – and where your SEO effort should go
Rand Fishkin’s conclusion from the SparkToro research is the most useful framing I’ve seen on this: search is a behaviour, not a channel. People search everywhere – Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, Amazon. The opportunity isn’t to abandon what’s working and chase whichever platform is generating LinkedIn posts this week. It’s to understand where your specific audience looks when they need what you offer.
For B2B service businesses, that’s still overwhelmingly Google. The data says so.
If you want to talk through what that looks like for your website, my 1:1 SEO session is a good place to start.
