AI & Search Research
OpenAI puts ChatGPT's search volume at 20 percent of Google's — which also means Google handles about five times as many searches. UK shops heading into Black Friday have good reason to work on both.
What OpenAI said
The Verge reports that OpenAI says the volume of search queries run through ChatGPT now equals 20 percent of the volume run through Google. Adam Fry, OpenAI's consumer product lead for ChatGPT, made the announcement at a press event on Monday. Search Engine Journal explains that the count covers each question that sends ChatGPT to the web.
Two points matter here. First, the figure is OpenAI's own measure, and nobody has checked it independently. Second, the same number means Google handles about five times ChatGPT's search volume, by OpenAI's own reckoning. Both things can be true at once. ChatGPT is a real place where people look things up, and Google remains the bigger one.
How shops get seen in each
Getting seen in ChatGPT works differently from Google. In Sayu's study of everyday UK searches, ChatGPT answers linked to at least one website 51.4% of the time, with about 2.9 sites per answer. That check ran in November 2026 and shows how answers looked then. The tools change often, so treat it as a snapshot. In plain terms, around half of those answers sent no link at all. The rest pointed to only a handful of sites, so being one of them counts.
Google is changing as well. The same study showed an AI Overview on 70.3% of the 360 everyday UK searches checked. That is one month's sample of common searches, and other queries may behave differently. Ranking well on Google now also means being useful enough to be quoted in those summaries.
Black Friday is where this gets practical. In Sayu's study of seasonal searches, "black friday" was the most-searched term in the UK across the terms measured, at 2.23 times the next product term, "black friday deals". That compares a fixed set of terms only. Online also accounted for 28.3% of UK retail sales in September 2026, according to the ONS. That is a single month's figure, but it shows how much of the shopping happens on screens.
One technical point is worth checking. Some sites block AI crawlers in their robots.txt file. GPTBot, which OpenAI uses for training its models, was shut out by 11.9% of the 4,130 most-visited UK (.uk) websites checked. Those are large, busy sites, so smaller shops may differ. ChatGPT search uses a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, so a shop can block training and still allow search.
What this means for UK businesses
- Check your own numbers first. Look in your analytics for visits from ChatGPT before moving any budget. What your customers do matters more than any headline figure.
- Keep Google at the centre of Black Friday plans. By OpenAI's own count, it is still the much bigger search channel.
- Aim to be cited in free ChatGPT answers. Clear product details, honest comparisons and plain answers to common questions give it something worth linking to.
- Check your robots.txt. Make sure you are not blocking ChatGPT's search crawler by accident.
Analysis compiled by Sayu (sayu.co.uk) from OpenAI's announcement as reported by The Verge and Search Engine Journal, and from Sayu's published research.
