A new audience-overlap finding is a useful corrective to the idea that AI search is replacing Google. And it changes how businesses should think about discovery and measurement.
I keep hearing a version of the same question from business leaders: Is AI search taking customers away from Google?
A new Similarweb audience-overlap figure offers a useful answer, with an important limit. In September, 93.7% of ChatGPT.com’s visitors also visited Google.com. The overlap ran the other way, too: 14.1% of Google.com’s visitors also visited ChatGPT.com, according to Search Engine Watch’s report.
That is not proof that someone asked ChatGPT about a product, then searched for it on Google. The data counts people who visited both websites during the month. It doesn’t show which one they used first, how often they searched, what they searched for or whether they bought anything. It also doesn’t capture the full use of either service through apps.
Those limits matter. But they don’t make the finding irrelevant. They tell us not to mistake channel overlap for channel substitution.
For years, marketers have organized discovery into tidy channels: search, social, referrals, paid media. AI assistants make that division harder to defend. A person might ask an AI tool to compare options, search a brand name in Google, watch a creator review, then visit a company’s site directly. The journey may cross several systems before the business gets a measurable click.
The Similarweb figure doesn’t prove that sequence. It does show why we shouldn’t assume that a visitor counted in an AI audience is a new person who has never used Google.
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