OpenAI says ChatGPT now gets about a fifth as many search-style questions as Google, which is its own estimate and the biggest scale claim it has made.

Adam Fry, who leads ChatGPT's consumer product, said "ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google." He described a search as "basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for", and said weekly users went "from one billion to 1.2" in two months. He named looking up "a person or people or a place or a thing" as the growth area. No data, time period or method was given, and Google did not respond. Schwartz called the figure surprising; Alex Kantrowitz noted Bing's share is about 5%.

A screenshot shows four ads in a row at the bottom of an AI Mode answer, up from the usual two and the three seen recently. Google gave no comment. Schwartz is not sure it is new and points to Google's earnings call promise to show "more ads, more often" in AI Mode.

Some sites saw clicks jump in the Search Console performance report on 31 October (up to about ten times a normal day per one agency, mostly UK clients) and over 2 to 3 November, with impressions flat. Joy Hawkins and Glenn Gabe confirmed it on some properties; by 4 November both said it was back to normal. Gabe guessed AI agents or bots; others suggested rank trackers or a bug. Google had not commented.