Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywords people usecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello and welcome to SEO's Not that Hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting, as usual, and today I'm asking the question how does ChatGPT really compare to Google? Now, this has come up because I've been thinking about this quite a bit recently, because I am using ChatGPT more and more often. I've mentioned this in a few podcasts recently and I was wondering how does that compare to people's general use online? How much is this affecting the online world? Because, as a website owner, I'm still seeing traffic strong across sites, notwithstanding Google's updates, changing things up and down, but in general, I'm not seeing, you know, major changes in people's user behavior, of the people that use our websites. But I'm wondering what's the long-term trend here? You know, obviously there's a lot of hype in the industry about ChatGPT and others like Claude and that kind of thing it's a case of. Is this really something that's a massive shift in the short term, or is it just something that we in the industry are noticing because it affects how we work, but it's not affecting many people? You know it's not. It's not the norm for people, say, to use, um, something like chat gpt. So I actually thought, you know, I'm going to dig into some statistics here. So I've been doing a good bit of looking around to see how many people actually use chat gpt and then sort of comparing that to how many people actually use google. So what I found is that currently you know, know this, I'm in October 2024.

Now there's something like the general consensus that I'm finding from all the different sources is that there's around 200 million sort of what we'll call active subscribers to ChatGPT. So that's its active user base. It's people who have used ChatGPT at some time during the last month, which sounds like a lot. But comparing that to Google, google has something like 5 billion users. So we are talking what's that? For? About 25 times bigger, if I got the maths right. Yeah, that's right, about 25 times bigger, if I got the maths right. Yeah, that's right, 25 times bigger. So for every one chat gpt user or, as I say, user song, for every one person that's used chat gpt this month, there are 25 people who have used google this month. So that's a big difference. And then if you look at how many of those people are using the ChatGPT paid version, so plus and above, the numbers vary, but it's somewhere between 4 million and 10 million depending on the source free versions you're limited in the models that you can use. You don't get the latest models, so you don't get the very best functionality. You're limited in terms of how it um touch gpt will work with um google search, with image so it was with searching a lot in general and with images and uploading files and things like that. So those people who are using the premium version like many of us listening to this probably are are actually incredibly small compared to that 5 billion. So let me do the maths on that. Yes, that works out around about somewhere between 500 and 1,000 Google users for every one paid ChatGPT user. While the noise in the industry is incredible about it, the actual user numbers out in the real world are still really really quite small.

I then looked at what kind of interactions people are having. So, in terms of Google searches per day, there are around 23 billion Google searches every single day, whereas chat GPT conversations every single day there's around about 10 million. So again, you're comparing the numbers, that's about 2,300 times more searches per day than there are chat GPT conversations. So you can see the vast gulf here. It becomes even more stark if you look at it and say, right, if we've got x number of users per month and they're making x number of searches or conversations per month, how often are people sort of you know, using and each of these services?

So google, uh, five billion users across 23 billion um searches per day. Times by 30 for a month, it equals 135 times a month. So an average google user is making 135 searches a month, whereas we've got 200 million um chat gpt users and 10 million um conversations a day. It actually works out as being the average ChatGPT user has one and a half conversations per month with ChatGPT. So you can see here, basically you're 100, well, basically almost 100 times more likely to use Google than you are to use ChatGPT.

And you know, google's embedded in people's usage patterns and they're going to go to it again and again and again. So this you can see here the difference in the kind of usage is actually massive. So again, just shows demonstrates how big the difference is out there and how most search behavior is still very much firmly entrenched in the Google world. So, yeah, I think that's a positive for SEOs and site owners out there. Most search behavior is still very much firmly entrenched in the google world. So, yeah, I think that's a positive for, you know, seo's and site owners out there that you know the world very much is still approaching a search through a search engine point of view rather than going directly through places like chat, gpt.

I think, obviously, as an industry, we're scared, possibly scared ourselves, because we are always going to be the kind of people that will use this kind of technology because it is very useful for content creators and people who work with a lot of data and that kind of thing. Well, if the average person out there on the street who ultimately are our customers and they're still very much entrenched in that google world and you know 99 of all search you know is still in that kind of traditional search engine way, and yeah it, things are going to change in time, surely, definitely. But in the short to medium term, I think we're still going to see google being that gateway, which is where that still very firmly has to be our focus. Anyway, that's it for me today. Hope you find this useful. Hope you find this interesting. I hope you've. You think I've got any of the stats wrong? Do correct me, do get in touch. Love to hear from you and but till next time, see you later.

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