Every week, someone on LinkedIn is selling the dream. ChatGPT is killing Google. Traditional SEO is dead. Pay £X for their GEO consultancy package and they’ll get you “optimised for AI search” before your competitors even know what’s hit them.
Semrush has just published 17 months of US clickstream data on ChatGPT usage. And it makes for interesting reading – particularly if you’ve been tempted by any of those pitches.
(Caveat: this is US data. The broad patterns are almost certainly directionally relevant for UK businesses, but the specific percentages will differ.)
Here’s what the data says:
ChatGPT’s growth has stalled
After explosive growth in 2024 and most of 2025, ChatGPT’s total traffic plateaued around November 2025, hovering near 1 billion monthly visits through early 2026. The “gold rush” phase is over.
Referral traffic – the visits ChatGPT sends to other websites – did grow 206% year on year. That sounds impressive until you look at where most of it went.
The biggest winner from ChatGPT’s growth is Google
Over 21% of all referral traffic from ChatGPT goes directly to Google. More than a fifth of people who use ChatGPT end up on Google straight afterwards – searching for more information, checking what they’ve been told, navigating to a website they’ve just discovered.
So the platform supposedly killing Google is sending a fifth of its outbound traffic straight back to it. The irony has its own irony.
What this tells us is that ChatGPT and Google aren’t in a straight fight for the same users. People are using both, often in the same session. Which makes “abandon your SEO strategy and optimise for AI search instead” advice look a bit shaky.
Most ChatGPT answers don’t use live web data
This is the bit the “AI SEO/GEO” crowd really won’t want you thinking about. As of February 2026, ChatGPT only enabled web search on 34.5% of queries. That’s down from 46% in late 2024.
The rest of the time, it’s answering from training data with a cutoff of June 2024.
So when someone asks ChatGPT about your “innovative professional services solutions,” there’s a better than two-thirds chance it’s not searching the web at all. It’s working from what it already knew nearly two years ago. All that frantic “optimising for AI search” content people are publishing right now? ChatGPT probably isn’t reading it.
ChatGPT users aren’t searching the way you’d expect
Between 65% and 85% of ChatGPT prompts don’t match any traditional search query in Semrush’s database of 27 billion keywords. People aren’t typing “HR consultant Wakefield” into ChatGPT. They’re typing things like ‘I’ve got 15 staff and our HR processes are a complete mess – do I need a consultant or can I sort this myself?”.
That’s not a keyword, it’s a conversation. And no amount of keyword research is going to help you optimise for it.
The most common prompt in the entire dataset made me literally LOL – “Describe me based on all our chats – make it catchy!” More than 21,000 people asked ChatGPT that. Not “find me a supplier.” Not “recommend a marketing agency.” People are using ChatGPT to describe themselves. To write barbecue invitations (genuinely the second most popular prompt category). To generate images of futuristic cities (???).
The commercial intent everyone’s rushing to “capture” in AI search is a fairly small slice of what people actually use ChatGPT for. Which I’ve spoken about before – most AI searches are generative.
So what should I do then Nikki?
The data is pretty clear cut – ChatGPT users end up on Google. Google is still where the vast majority of commercial search happens. The basics and fundamentals that have always mattered – useful content, genuine expertise, a website that answers the questions your customers are asking – are still what matter. I know, I sound like a broken fucking record, but honestly, that record is right.
A good SEO foundation will serve you in traditional search and make you more visible in AI search. They’re not separate problems requiring separate solutions.
Anyone telling you otherwise has a consultancy package to sell you.
If you don’t believe me, believe the SEMrush research.
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