AI

ChatGPT takes questions from Google, but not clicks yet

Google still has about 97% of users in Poland, yet more and more questions go to chat assistants. We checked how much of that comes back to websites as traffic and sales.

Bartosz Bielawski

Bartosz Bielawski

· 3 min read
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ChatGPT takes questions from Google, but not clicks yet

Signal in the data

Independent sources on this topic: 4 in the last week, 10 in 30 days, 10 in 90 days. We have tracked it since 2025-12-27; 38 claims in our database in total.

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Number of independent sources per week (last 12 weeks).

What is happening

Google still has about 97% of users in Poland, but search is now spread across several places. Alongside Google, people now ask ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Claude.

In October, traffic attributed to ChatGPT in GA4 collapsed. Within a few days of October 9, sessions fell by 22-57%, depending on the site.

It looked like the end of the chat trend. Measurement showed something else: what changed was how traffic is passed on, not the number of questions.

What the sources agree on

Sources agree on the scale of the traffic. Across a year of GA4 data from a hundred sites, ChatGPT traffic equals 0.62% of what Google Organic sends.

They also agree on quality. Visits from chat converted at 13.8%, clearly better than visits from Google Organic. The catch: Google accounted for 96.5% of all conversions.

Everyone also repeats one more point: ChatGPT searches through Bing. Your visibility in chat depends on what Bing has in its index.

Where they disagree

The first dispute is whether the GA4 drop reflects a real loss. Search Engine Journal argues it is mostly a change in reporting.

The evidence is on its side. Adobe looked at five hundred sites and found that visits from ChatGPT fell by 31,000 a day, while direct traffic rose by 26,000. Almost the same number of visits arrived by another route.

The second dispute is what should be counted in the first place. Clicks from chat answers are rare - far rarer than from Google. Count conversations that end without a click, and ChatGPT's share of the process rises above 5%.

What to do about it

First, stop treating ChatGPT as a channel that doesn't exist. The questions are there; you just can't see them in click data.

What to do: put chat traffic in its own GA4 segment and look at it alongside direct traffic. When traffic drops, check both at once, because one number falls as the other rises.

The second step is Bing. Make sure your key pages are indexed and that your brand appears as a source in answers.

Our take

ChatGPT takes questions from Google, but for now it isn't taking the money attached to them. Chat traffic is marginal, even though it converts better. The GA4 drop is mostly a measurement problem, not lost visits. Treat chat as a place to build recognition, not as a sales channel.

Confidence: medium, because the traffic data comes mostly from the US market and ChatGPT traffic measurement is still evolving. We will change our view if: independent studies show chat traffic exceeding 2% of Google traffic, or chat starts sending traffic that actually turns into sales.

Sources

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