According to an analysis of 80 million clickstream of global data by Semrush, websites related to software development, technology and education saw an increase in referral traffic from ChatGPT in the second half of 2024. ChatGPT also sent traffic to about 30,000 unique domains by November 2024. The analysis also found that ChatGPT also changed how people search, with answering 54% of the queries without search on and 46% queries which involved search. On average, the prompts by ChatGPT were 23 words long, with the highest reaching up to 2712 words. The search length of ChatGPT on average was just 4.2 words and the highest reaching 301 words.
The shift in search intent on ChatGPT was clear as traditional search engines only categorise keywords in informational, commercial, navigational and transactional types. But on the other hand, only 30% of the ChatGPT prompts fit into those categories, which means that 70% of ChatGPT prompts are unique and are not typically seen on classic search engines like Bing or Google.
The analysis also found that ChatGPT is giving more referral traffic to different sites other than Google like tech or AI-related platforms and OpenAI related domains. The referral traffic ChatGPT is giving sites other than Bing are education, research and technical resources as well as academic publishers. Semrush also found that ChatGPT got 566 million worldwide users in December 2024 while Google got 6.5 billion worldwide users within the same time period. It was also found that most ChatGPT users are younger males and ChatGPT is a favorite site for students while Google receives more full-time workers, retirees and homemakers.
The author of the report, Brenna Kelly, says that content creators and marketers have to keep up with all these changes in search markets and should focus on things other than traditional SEO. Brands need to work on making content that can be sites by large language models like ChatGPT so their website can get more visitors.
Review the charts below for deeper insights.
Read next:
• Websites Are Losing Free Traffic, So Brands Are Spending More on Ads to Get Visitors
• How Much Are Scams Really Costing You? The Numbers Are Shocking
The shift in search intent on ChatGPT was clear as traditional search engines only categorise keywords in informational, commercial, navigational and transactional types. But on the other hand, only 30% of the ChatGPT prompts fit into those categories, which means that 70% of ChatGPT prompts are unique and are not typically seen on classic search engines like Bing or Google.
The analysis also found that ChatGPT is giving more referral traffic to different sites other than Google like tech or AI-related platforms and OpenAI related domains. The referral traffic ChatGPT is giving sites other than Bing are education, research and technical resources as well as academic publishers. Semrush also found that ChatGPT got 566 million worldwide users in December 2024 while Google got 6.5 billion worldwide users within the same time period. It was also found that most ChatGPT users are younger males and ChatGPT is a favorite site for students while Google receives more full-time workers, retirees and homemakers.
The author of the report, Brenna Kelly, says that content creators and marketers have to keep up with all these changes in search markets and should focus on things other than traditional SEO. Brands need to work on making content that can be sites by large language models like ChatGPT so their website can get more visitors.
Review the charts below for deeper insights.
Read next:
• Websites Are Losing Free Traffic, So Brands Are Spending More on Ads to Get Visitors
• How Much Are Scams Really Costing You? The Numbers Are Shocking
