Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people search for and engage with online content. While Google remains the dominant force in search, ChatGPT is quickly carving out its own space, particularly among younger audiences and students.

Recent research from Semrush, analysing more than 80 million lines of global clickstream data, shows how ChatGPT is not only handling unique types of queries but also driving significant referral traffic to certain industries. For marketers and digital strategists, understanding these shifts is becoming essential as AI-powered platforms reshape online discovery.

ChatGPT’s Growing Role as a Traffic Referrer

Between July and November 2024, ChatGPT’s role as a traffic driver accelerated dramatically. In July, fewer than 10,000 unique domains received traffic from ChatGPT in a single day. By November, that figure had surpassed 30,000. This rapid growth demonstrates how ChatGPT is establishing itself as a meaningful source of referral traffic, despite its relatively smaller audience compared to traditional search engines.

The majority of these visits were directed towards education, technology, and software development websites. Educational and research platforms are now receiving more referral traffic from ChatGPT than from Microsoft Bing, highlighting its growing influence in knowledge-driven sectors. This trend reflects the profile of ChatGPT’s user base, which skews younger and more student-focused. While Google continues to serve a broad range of age groups and professions, ChatGPT users are more likely to be in education, actively seeking technical resources or conducting research. This explains the increase in traffic to academic publishers, learning platforms, and technical documentation sites.

How Search Behaviour is Changing

Generative AI is not only shifting where users land but also how they search. ChatGPT supports two distinct modes of operation: with search enabled or disabled. Around 54% of ChatGPT queries are handled without live web search, relying purely on its internal knowledge base, while 46% involve web search to provide updated information.

User behaviour differs significantly between these modes. When search is disabled, prompts tend to be longer and more detailed, averaging 23 words, with some extending into thousands of words. These interactions are often complex, creative, or problem-solving tasks that do not translate easily into traditional keyword queries.

When search is enabled, the prompt length drops to an average of just 4.2 words, closely resembling the concise, direct search queries seen on Google. This suggests users switch to a more targeted, answer-driven approach when they expect live, real-time data.

However, the most notable shift is not just in length but in purpose. Only 30% of ChatGPT prompts align with traditional search intent categories such as informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. The remaining 70% are unique, representing new forms of intent such as brainstorming, creating, or refining ideas. For digital marketers, this is a clear signal that user needs are evolving beyond what conventional SEO strategies were built to serve.

Why This Matters for Marketers

The emergence of ChatGPT as an alternative search tool is pushing marketers to rethink their approach to online visibility. Historically, SEO focused on crawlability, indexability, and rankability. Now, there is a growing need to ensure retrievability—the ability for a brand’s content to be accessed, understood, and cited by Large Language Models (LLMs).

To stay visible in an AI-driven search environment, brands must prioritise clear, structured content that LLMs can surface and reference within conversational experiences. This requires making information available across authoritative web sources, ensuring content is well-organised on owned platforms, and earning citations from credible, high-profile domains.

Furthermore, the value of optimising for ChatGPT is not purely about direct referral traffic. Conversational AI introduces a new type of brand exposure. Rather than focusing solely on clicks and conversions, there is value in being part of the answers users receive when they engage in research, problem-solving, and creative planning. Visibility within these AI-powered experiences helps build mindshare and trust, positioning brands as authoritative resources within their sectors.

Looking Beyond Google

While ChatGPT may never topple Google in terms of referral traffic, its growing influence should not be underestimated. Together with other emerging AI-driven search tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT is helping to shape the future of search itself. These platforms are already influencing how Google evolves its own search experience, as generative AI changes user expectations around relevance, context, and personalisation.

As more users experiment with conversational search, Google is under increasing pressure to integrate richer, more dynamic AI-driven features. The search landscape is no longer defined by a single dominant player but is rapidly becoming more fragmented and fluid. For marketers, this marks a shift towards multi-platform optimisation, where success depends on being visible not only on Google but across a growing ecosystem of generative AI tools that help users discover and interact with content in new ways.

The First-Mover Advantage

With the generative AI market projected to grow by over 24% annually through 2030, brands that adapt early and create content designed for AI-driven search stand to gain a significant advantage. While this does not replace traditional SEO, it requires an evolution of existing strategies. Content that supports learning, problem-solving, and creativity will better align with the emerging search patterns seen on ChatGPT and other AI platforms.

For educational institutions, technical resources, and research-led organisations, the opportunity is particularly strong. ChatGPT is already driving meaningful traffic to these sectors, offering a new route to engage students and professionals actively seeking guidance and insight. However, other industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail are also seeing growth, albeit on a smaller scale. These sectors can benefit from understanding how AI search users seek advice, comparisons, and tailored recommendations.

How to Prepare Your Brand for AI-Powered Discovery

Success in this shifting landscape requires action. Marketers should:

1. Audit existing content to ensure it is well-structured, easy to understand, and clearly answers common queries within your sector.
2. Optimise for brand mentions across reputable sites, industry publications, and relevant knowledge bases to increase visibility in LLM-generated outputs.
3. Develop new content formats such as listicles, summaries, and how-to guides, which tend to perform well within AI-powered search responses.
4. Track brand visibility across AI platforms using specialised monitoring tools to identify opportunities, monitor sentiment, and address content gaps.

Generative AI is not just a new feature within the search landscape; it represents a fundamental shift in how people seek, create, and engage with information. Brands that adapt their digital strategy now, focusing on content that serves knowledge-driven, problem-solving, and creative intents, will secure a competitive edge. By evolving SEO to account for retrievability and ensuring brand information is accessible to AI systems, organisations can build lasting relevance as the world of search continues to transform.