Is AI Taking Search Market Share from Google? What Brands Need to Know

The search landscape is experiencing its most significant disruption in over a decade. While headlines proclaim the rise of AI-powered search engines, the reality is more nuanced—and brands need to understand both the hype and the facts to adapt their strategies effectively.

The Current State of Search: Google vs. AI

Let’s start with the numbers. Google still dominates with over 80% of all digital queries globally, while ChatGPT commands a significant 9.0% of queries—a notable share for a relatively new platform. More notably, Google’s global search share has dipped below 90% for the first time in most of 2025, with Bing, Yandex, and AI-native tools like ChatGPT Search gaining traction.

However, context matters. Google Search’s daily query volume remains vastly higher, with estimates showing Google handled roughly 373 times more queries than ChatGPT in 2024, and all AI-powered search tools combined made up less than 2% of the market.

The more interesting metric isn’t just query volume—it’s user engagement. Despite fewer users, ChatGPT has a substantially longer session duration, indicating deep user engagement. This suggests that while AI search may handle fewer queries, users are spending more time and potentially making more considered decisions within these platforms.

The Growth Trajectory

The AI search market is experiencing explosive growth. Year-on-year unique visitors for AI search have doubled from 338 million in August 2024 to 743 million in August 2025. The overall market is projected to expand dramatically, with valuations rising from $16.9 billion in 2025 to $41.6 billion by 2033, representing a CAGR of 11.2%.

This isn’t a replacement scenario—it’s an expansion of how people search for information. Different queries are being routed to other platforms based on user intent, complexity, and desired interaction style.

What This Means for Brands: Beyond Traditional SEO

The emergence of AI search presents a fundamental challenge for brands: traditional SEO strategies are no longer sufficient. When an AI model synthesizes information from multiple sources to answer a query, simply ranking on page one of Google isn’t enough. Your brand needs to be mentioned, cited, and recommended by AI systems.

Enter the new frameworks marketers are adopting:

Share of Model (SOM)

Share of Model (SOM) is a new concept that helps marketers gauge how prominently their brand appears before consumers in LLM searches, assessed through mention rate, human-AI awareness gap, and brand and category sentiment. Think of it as the AI equivalent of share of voice.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

AI search works on intent, not keywords. It reads content, then grounds answers with sources, leaning on third-party citations, community threads, and trusted publications. It tends to trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.

This represents a paradigm shift. Traditional SEO focused on what you publish on your own website. GEO requires you to build a broader ecosystem of credible mentions across the web.

Five Actionable Strategies for Brands

1. Build Authority Through Third-Party Mentions

Focus on structured data and mentions for LLMs and GEO, expert quotes in trade publications, first-party research citations, and brand mentions across authoritative sites. Your PR and content marketing teams need to work together more closely than ever.

2. Optimize for Intent, Not Just Keywords

AI models understand context and user intent. Create content that genuinely and comprehensively answers questions. Focus on topics rather than individual keywords, and ensure your content demonstrates expertise and authority.

3. Embrace Multi-Platform Visibility

Develop short-form social content for TikTok and Reels with searchable captions and hashtags, video content optimized for discovery, and cross-platform content threading. AI models pull from diverse sources, so your brand needs to be where the conversations happen.

4. Implement the “Seen & Trusted” Framework

The Seen & Trusted Framework is a systematic approach to help your brand earn mentions in AI answers and citations as a trusted source, thereby multiplying visibility, trust, and conversions across platforms such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity.

5. Audit Your AI Visibility

Optimize your content strategy by assessing your visibility against competitors for common FAQs relevant to your target audience. Test how AI search engines respond to queries about your category and brand. Are you being mentioned? How are you being positioned?

Is AI taking market share from Google? Yes, incrementally. Is it an existential threat to Google’s dominance? Not yet. But the more pressing question for brands isn’t about Google’s market share—it’s about your brand’s share of attention across an increasingly fragmented search ecosystem.

The brands that will thrive in this new landscape aren’t those that choose between SEO and AI optimization. They’re the ones that recognize these as complementary strategies requiring a unified approach: create genuinely valuable content, build authority through third-party validation, optimize for intent rather than algorithms, and maintain visibility across every platform where your audience seeks information.

The search revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here. The question is whether your brand is ready to be found in it.

Ready to audit your brand’s AI visibility? Start by searching for your product category in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. The answers you find—or don’t find—will tell you everything you need to know about where to start.