Could ChatGPT search have a 1% share of the search market sometime next year? Yes, according to new internal data the enterprise SEO platform shared with Search Engine Land today.
- “For the first time, we can see a trend where ChatGPT could cross the magic 1% market share threshold sometime next year,” said Jim Yu, founder and CEO of BrightEdge.
Why it matters to us. AI search is evolving rapidly. It’s important to watch how people adopt AI search because it can change the way people discover you, your brand, or your website. We’re watching it happen month after month right now. And with ChatGPT Search now available to all free users, this growth could accelerate even further.
ChatGPT vs. Perplexity. ChatGPT is now six times larger than Perplexity, according to an LLM recommendations analysis of November traffic from BrightEdge. Search traffic from ChatGPT (up 44%) and Perplexity (up 71%) also continues to grow month over month.
But. Google is still by far the leader with 92.4% of referral traffic. Meanwhile, Microsoft Bing’s market share was 4.2% in November.
Wait… Maybe you’ve heard that Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, estimated ChatGPT’s search market share at 4.33% last month based on data from SimilarWeb and Datos (an SEMrush company)? How is there such a huge discrepancy and confusion in market share numbers?
Well, this BrightEdge analysis is based on referral data. Additionally, Fishkin later downplayed the 4% figure in his BrightonSEO keynote as not every prompt/chat is a “search.”
So if you’ve heard that ChatGPT’s search market share is 4%, you can safely call that statistic false and ignore it.
