Will AI Search Replace Google?

No, AI search will not replace Google. Google still handled 89.9% of the world’s searches in September 2026, and its own AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users. What AI search is replacing is the click, and that shift hits your store harder than any new search engine will.

Below is where the searches went, where the clicks went, and what I’d change on a store.

Key Points

• AI tools took 3.2% of US desktop searches in 2025, behind Amazon, Bing, and YouTube.
• Google’s AI Overviews reach over 2.5 billion people a month, so most AI search happens inside Google.
• Searchers click a result on 8% of Google visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one.
• AI referrals to US retail grew 393% in a year and now convert 42% better than other traffic.
• Your how-to posts lose clicks first. Collection and product pages hold up.

Is AI Search Taking Searches Away From Google?

AI search is taking about 3% of searches away from Google, not replacing it. Rand Fishkin’s study of 41 sites where people search found AI tools held 3.2% of US desktop search activity in 2025, while Google alone held 73.7% in the fourth quarter.

That study counted every place people type a search, including Amazon, YouTube, and Reddit. On that wider map, ChatGPT sat behind Amazon, Bing, and YouTube, and its growth flattened through the year. Google lost 3.5 points of share in the US across 2025, but most of that went to the long tail of other sites and not to chatbots.

On the narrower map, the one that only counts search engines, Statcounter put Google at 89.94% worldwide in September 2026. Bing was second at 5.29%.

So when a founder asks me if SEO is dead, I point at those numbers. A tool with 3% of searches does not replace a tool with 74% to 90% of them. Plan your store around where shoppers search today, and that is still Google by a wide margin.

Most AI Search Already Happens Inside Google

Most AI search already happens inside Google, where AI Overviews and AI Mode sit on the same results page people have used for twenty years. In Sundar Pichai’s I/O 2026 keynote, Google said AI Overviews have over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode passed 1 billion within a year of launch.

Those two numbers are bigger than any AI-first search tool. Google also says people who use its AI features end up searching more, not less. They read the summary, then ask a follow-up in the same box.

Even ChatGPT leans on Google. A RESONEO study of 1,249 ChatGPT answers from July 2026 found that in paid thinking mode, 74.6% of the search results ChatGPT pulled were scraped from Google. The tool that was supposed to replace Google is reading Google’s results to write its answers.

For your store, that means the “AI search” a shopper uses is most likely a Google product. The work of getting cited in Google’s AI Overviews reaches more buyers than any chatbot plan, and it starts from the rankings you already have.

The Click Is Shrinking, Not the Search

The click is shrinking, not the search: AI answers satisfy people right on the results page. Pew Research tracked 68,879 real Google searches and found users clicked a result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one.

What searchers did	With an AI summary	Without one
Clicked a regular result	8%	15%
Clicked a link inside the summary	1%	n/a
Ended the browsing session	26%	16%

Pew saw a summary on 18% of searches back in March 2025, and Google has widened AI Overviews since. Each step of that rollout moves more of your keywords from click territory into answer territory, whether your rankings move or not. A page can hold position one all year while the visits from it fall by half.

Play that out on a store. Someone searches “how to clean a wool rug” and your care guide used to win that click. Today the AI Overview answers it, cites you, and the shopper moves on.

Your guide did its job for the machine and got nothing back for the store. That squeeze started years ago with featured snippets, and I walk through the history in AI Overviews vs featured snippets. The AI version is the same idea at a much larger scale.

Which Store Pages Lose Clicks First?

Your how-to posts lose clicks first, since Pew found 60% of searches that start with a question word trigger an AI summary, against 8% of one- and two-word searches. Collection and product searches are short and specific, so they keep more of their clicks.

That gap is why a falling sessions chart can mislead you. I cover the traffic side in does AI search kill organic traffic, and the short version holds: a store can lose 20% of its sessions, keep its buyers, and come out ahead on profit.

So I sort the loss by page type before I judge it:

1. Pull the top 50 landing pages from Search Console for this quarter and the same quarter last year.
2. Tag each one as a how-to post, a comparison post, a collection page, or a product page.
3. Lay revenue from GA4 next to the sessions for each page.
4. Total the change in sessions and the change in revenue by page type.

After that sort, the panic usually fades. The how-to posts almost always show the biggest drop and the smallest share of sales. The pages that pay the bills are often flat or up.

Plan for fewer clicks per search, not fewer searches, and measure the clicks you keep by what they buy. The shopper who does click through an AI answer already read the comparison, so they arrive closer to the wallet.

Will ChatGPT Replace Google for Shopping?

No, ChatGPT will not replace Google for shopping any time soon, though it is the fastest-growing source of store traffic. Adobe’s retail data shows AI referrals to US retail sites grew 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026.

That growth starts from a small base. In the SparkToro data, AI tools as a group held 3.2% of search activity while commerce sites like Amazon held about 10%. A shopper who already knows what they want still goes to Google or straight to a store.

But the visits that do arrive from AI are worth watching. Adobe measured that traffic converting 42% better than other traffic in March 2026, after converting 38% worse a year earlier. A shopper who asked a chatbot five questions before clicking shows up ready to buy.

What would change my answer?

Two numbers would change my answer: Google falling under 80% on Statcounter, or AI tools passing 10% of search activity in a study like SparkToro’s. Neither is close today. Both sources are public, so the check takes five minutes a quarter.

Should you move budget from SEO to AI search?

No, you should not move budget from SEO to AI search, since the two draw on the same pages. A dollar spent making a collection page clearer helps it rank in Google, get quoted in AI Overviews, and get pulled into ChatGPT. Splitting the budget just means doing the same work twice under two names.

Do the Same Work for Google and AI Answers

Doing the same work for Google and AI answers is the right plan, since every engine in this post reads the same crawlable, quotable pages. Google’s AI features build on its own index, and ChatGPT pulls from Google’s results plus an index its own crawler fills.

Still, I get pitched a separate AI playbook every week, and I have not found one worth buying. The answer-first format that gets you into Google’s AI Overviews is the same one ChatGPT likes to quote. Write the direct answer in the first two sentences, then earn the depth below it.

From there, spend your next round of work on the pages that still earn the click. Someone searching “wool area rugs 8×10” wants to see rugs, prices, and shipping times, not a paragraph about wool. No AI summary can hand a shopper a cart, so your collection pages are the moat.

Product pages sit right behind them. Shopping tools quote product pages directly, so clean data, clear specs, and reviews decide if your page gets pulled into the answer or skipped. That page-by-page cleanup is where my AI search services start.

One more thing: get your brand mentioned in the places AI reads. The engines lean on comparison posts, forum threads, and reviews when they decide which store to name. A store nobody else mentions rarely gets recommended, no matter how clean its own pages are.

Want to See Which Pages AI Answers Are Eating?

Google is not going anywhere, but the click economy under it is being repriced. The stores that come out ahead answer questions machines can quote, keep product pages worth clicking, and measure revenue instead of raw sessions.

If you want to see where your store sits, book a call. I’ll pull your Search Console and show you which pages AI answers are already eating and which ones are still earning buyers. If you want the fixes handled too, that is what my AI search services for Shopify cover.

Sources

• Statcounter: Search Engine Market Share Worldwide
• SparkToro: Search Happens Everywhere, an Analysis of 41 Websites
• Google: Sundar Pichai’s I/O 2026 keynote
• RESONEO: What ChatGPT pulls, what it shows, what it cites
• Adobe: U.S. retailers see surge in AI traffic
• Pew Research Center: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears