They’re Using Both. Here’s What That Means for Your SEO Strategy.
A recent Search Engine Journal analysis of new Similarweb data confirms something we’ve been telling our clients at DNA Digital Marketing for months: 95% of ChatGPT users also appeared in Google’s audience from September 2025 through May 2026, even as visits to generative AI platforms grew 70% year over year (Search Engine Journal).
On the surface, that sounds like reassuring news for anyone worried about the “death of Google.” But if you read past the headline, the picture is much more nuanced — and much more important for how you invest in search visibility.
The 95% overlap tells you that the same people are showing up on both platforms. It does not tell you:
- How many queries those users actually run on Google
- Which types of questions they’ve moved to ChatGPT
- Whether they still click through to your website
- Whether they’re seeing traditional blue links at all, or just Google’s AI-generated answers
That gap between “audience” and “behavior” is where the real story lives — and where SEO strategy has to evolve.
Users are searching less, and clicking even less
A Bocconi University working paper analyzed U.S. desktop clickstream data from Comscore covering October 2024 through July 2025, tracking households that gained access to ChatGPT Search versus similar households without it (Search Engine Journal). The results:
- Traditional search queries dropped by an average of 3.14 per week after ChatGPT Search access, a 9.4% reduction from the pre-expansion baseline of 33.51 weekly queries.
- After 20 weeks with access, the reduction grew to 17.0%.
- Google’s household reach stayed stable at roughly 49%, while ChatGPT’s grew from 4.6% to 7.9%.
Meanwhile, a separate field experiment by Wang et al., published on arXiv in August, put 1,100 U.S. Chrome users into forced AI Mode on Google for a week and measured what happened (Search Engine Journal):
- Click-through to external websites fell by 18.8 percentage points.
- Daily search sessions dropped by about 0.92 per day.
- Average session duration rose by 0.43 minutes — people were spending longer per session but visiting fewer sites.
Translation: your prospects can still be “on Google,” search less than they used to, and click through to your website far less often than they did last year.
Not every website is affected equally
The Bocconi researchers also broke referral changes down by site category after households gained ChatGPT Search access:
| Site category | Change in search referrals |
| Academic sites | -32.8% |
| Reference sites | -26.5% |
| Developer sites | -15.1% |
| News sites | -13.4% |
| Marketplaces | Barely moved |
| Entertainment sites | Barely moved |
Wang’s AI Mode experiment showed similar patterns for clicks: news sites down 12.5 points, Reddit down 21.2, Wikipedia down 9.9 (Search Engine Journal).
The lesson for our clients in professional services, construction, and industrial sectors: informational and educational content is being absorbed by AI answers, while transactional and commercial queries are holding up better. That doesn’t mean you stop publishing helpful content — it means the job of that content has changed. It needs to earn citations inside AI answers, not just clicks on a results page.
Why “impressions look fine but traffic is down” is now the norm
Perhaps the most important insight from the research is that audience, queries, sessions, impressions, clicks, and referral traffic are now six different things — and they can move independently.
You can be:
- Ranking well and generating impressions
- Getting cited inside AI Overviews and AI Mode
- Losing referral clicks because Google answered the question in-page
- Still technically “reaching” a user who never scrolled past the AI summary
Google confirmed at I/O in May that AI Overviews now have more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has reached more than 1 billion users in its first year (Search Engine Journal). A growing share of Google usage is happening inside AI features where the traditional 10 blue links never appear.
And here’s the attribution problem no analytics tool has solved yet: if a prospect asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, then Googles your brand name and clicks through, that visit shows up as organic search in Search Console. The AI conversation that actually generated the demand is invisible in your reporting (Search Engine Journal).
Why DNA Digital Marketing combines SEO, AEO, and GEO
This is exactly why we’ve built our practice around three disciplines working together, not as separate services:
SEO — Search Engine Optimization
The foundation still matters. Technical health, crawlability, structured data, topical authority, and quality backlinks are what qualify your content to be surfaced anywhere — including inside AI answers. If Google can’t understand your site, neither can Gemini or ChatGPT.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
AEO is about being the answer, not just a link. That means structuring content so AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT can extract clear, quotable statements from your pages: crisp definitions, well-formatted lists, comparison tables, unambiguous facts, and clean question-and-answer patterns. When AI Overviews reach 2.5 billion users a month, being the cited source is often more valuable than being the tenth blue link.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
GEO extends AEO into the generative platforms themselves — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude. It’s about entity clarity, brand mentions across authoritative sources, structured “about” data, review signals, and the digital PR footprint that trains large language models to know who you are, what you sell, and who you serve. Because branded search lift is one of the few ways AI-driven demand actually shows up in your reporting, GEO is now a direct revenue lever, not a vanity metric.
None of these disciplines replaces the others. Together they make sure your clients find you whether they’re typing into Google, reading an AI Overview, or asking ChatGPT for a recommendation.
What your SEO reporting needs to track now
If you’re still evaluating your search program on rankings and organic sessions alone, you’re measuring one shrinking slice of a much bigger picture. Modern reporting should separately track:
- Audience reach — how many real people are exposed to your brand across search and AI
- Query volume and impressions — where you show up
- External clicks and referral traffic — how much of that visibility becomes site visits
- Branded search lift — the strongest available signal that AI is generating demand for you
- AI visibility — how often you’re cited or named inside AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answers
- Conversions and revenue — the only numbers that actually pay the bills
When those metrics diverge — impressions flat, clicks falling, branded searches rising — that’s not a broken campaign. That’s the new search economy working exactly as the research predicts.
The people you want to reach haven’t left Google. They’re using Google and ChatGPT and AI Overviews and AI Mode, often within the same research session. They’re searching a little less, clicking a lot less, and expecting answers instead of link lists. The brands that win in this environment are the ones optimized to show up everywhere the answer gets generated, not just where the old blue links used to live.
That’s not a future problem. It’s happening in your analytics right now.
Ready to be found across Google, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT?
At DNA Digital Marketing in Rochester, NY, we help growth-focused businesses combine SEO, AEO, and GEO into a single visibility strategy that meets your customers wherever they’re actually searching — traditional results, AI answers, or generative chat.
Book a free 30-minute AI Search Visibility Audit. We’ll show you exactly where your brand is showing up (and where it’s missing) across Google’s classic results, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Perplexity — and give you a prioritized roadmap to close the gaps.
👉 Schedule your audit with DNA Digital Marketing or call us to talk through your search visibility goals.
Source: Matt G. Southern, “People Aren’t Leaving Google For AI. They’re Using Both,” Search Engine Journal, September 4, 2026.
