AI search vs Google: where your customers actually ask

The short answer

Your customers are on both, and almost all of them use both. Google is still where people find a business and check it. AI assistants are where more and more of them decide what kind of business to look for, what it should cost and who seems trustworthy. If you only measure clicks, AI looks like a rounding error. If you measure who asked what before they called you, it doesn't.

Google is still far bigger

Start with scale, because a lot of what you'll read skips it. Google said in March 2025 that it handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, about 13.7 billion a day. ChatGPT is the largest assistant by a wide margin, and OpenAI put it at 1.2 billion weekly users at its developer conference on September 29, 2026. Huge, and still a fraction of Google's query volume.

The traffic gap is wider still. SE Ranking tracked 101,574 websites from January 2025 to April 2026 and found AI platforms sent 0.32 percent of all website visits, against 42.75 percent from organic search. Google and its peers send roughly 134 visitors for every one that arrives from an AI answer. AI referrals did grow sixteenfold since 2024, and ChatGPT accounted for 74.78 percent of them.

And it isn't either-or. Similarweb found that 461 million of ChatGPT's 494 million users also used Google between March and May 2026. That's 95 percent. People didn't switch. They added a step.

Where customers start a local search

For finding a business near you, Google still owns the first move. BrightLocal asked 1,227 US consumers who'd searched for a local business in the last three months where they started that search:

Eight percent sounds small. The same study shows what those people did next: 43 percent of the ones who started with AI went on to Google for more information, and only 18 percent of people who used AI for a local search felt ready to contact the business it suggested straight away. The assistant made the shortlist. Google, the reviews and the website closed it.

The other half of the picture is how fast that 8 percent formed. In BrightLocal's 2026 review survey, 45 percent of consumers had used ChatGPT or another AI tool to find a local business, up from 6 percent the year before. Google's share of people using review sites slipped from 83 percent to 71 percent over the same twelve months. Still first, by a lot. Not by as much.

The questions that moved first

This is where our own data comes in. In August 2026 we pulled monthly volumes for about 70 marketing and AI questions from DataForSEO: Google Ads search volume, plus its estimate of how often each question gets asked to AI assistants in the US. The AI column is a modelled estimate, not a log from OpenAI, so read the ratios rather than the exact counts.

The split is hard to miss. "How much does a marketing agency cost" gets asked to an assistant nearly ten times as often as it gets typed into Google. "What does a marketing agency do" is now asked more often in AI than on Google. Meanwhile the name-a-product searches, like "ai receptionist," still go to Google by a factor of 36.

It fits what OpenAI's own researchers found when they classified ChatGPT conversations. Practical guidance, seeking information and writing make up nearly 80 percent of messages, and the paper's summary is that ChatGPT's value comes largely through "decision support." People open Google to find a thing. They open ChatGPT to work out which thing, and what it should cost.

For a service business, that sorts your questions into two piles:

• Still Google's. "Physio near me," your business name, your hours, directions, "open now." Your Google Business Profile answers these, and nothing on the AI side replaces it
• Moving to assistants. "How much should laser hair removal cost," "is a med spa or a dermatologist better for this," "what should I ask before hiring a bookkeeper." The answers name businesses, and the ones named are the ones whose pages answered the question plainly

Google itself now answers first

The line between the two is blurring from Google's side too. When an AI Overview sits at the top of a results page, Pew Research found users clicked a regular result on 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent without one. They clicked a source link inside the summary 1 percent of the time.

So even a customer who has never opened ChatGPT is reading an AI-written answer before your link. Ranking on page one still matters, and being the source the summary draws on matters more each quarter.

What this means for where you spend

Don't move your budget out of Google. Point some of it at the questions that moved.

• Keep the Google basics current: the Business Profile, recent reviews, a fast site with your services and prices in the page text. AI assistants read the same reviews, so this work counts twice
• Write down the five decision questions your customers ask before they book, especially about cost and about choosing between options. Then check whether your site answers each one in a paragraph someone could quote
• Ask those questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity yourself and note who gets named. Our diagnostic post walks through the five reasons you might be missing
• Measure differently. AI shortlists rarely show up as a referral in analytics; they show up as a direct visit or a branded Google search a day later. Ask new customers where they first heard of you

An honest limit. If your customers find you walking past or on the map, and nobody compares options before booking, the Google Business Profile is the whole job and an AI strategy is a nice-to-have. That's a real answer. The decision-question shift matters most for businesses people research before they call: clinics, med spas, professional services, anything with a price someone wants to sanity-check.

Where we fit

Our Website & Search line covers both sides for $1,000 a month: your site, Google search and your Business Profile, plus the pages and markup that get you quoted in AI answers. It's on the pricing page with everything else, and the AI search page has what that work involves week to week. Search takes about 90 days to move. You'll see what's shipping every week before that, and nothing goes live until you approve it.

Sources

• Search Engine Land, Google now sees more than 5 trillion searches per year, March 2025
• Engadget, OpenAI Dev Day live blog, September 29, 2026
• SE Ranking, AI traffic research study, June 18, 2026
• Search Engine Journal, AI search isn't replacing Google, it's layering on top (Similarweb data), July 30, 2026
• BrightLocal, Where are your customers really searching? and Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
• Chatterji et al., How People Use ChatGPT, NBER Working Paper 34255, September 2025
• Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears, July 22, 2025
• Sundayable keyword research, DataForSEO Google Ads and AI keyword volumes, US, measured August 25, 2026