Local Memo: Google Search Traffic Up, AI Mode Released

Google Search Traffic Up Nearly 22% Year over Year

The News Despite all the stories in the search press about Google’s search dominance being threatened as its quality degrades and AI competitors grow in popularity, traffic to Google search was up 21.64% in 2024, compared to 2023. This is traffic to the primary Google.com web search, as opposed to secondary properties like Google Images or, more pointedly, Gemini. A new study from Rand Fishkin at Sparktoro revealed this finding.

Fishkin notes that Google recently cited its overall search volume in 2024 as 5 trillion searches, and Sparktoro’s findings speak to a significant growth in usage, perhaps due in part to Google’s own efforts to introduce features like AI Overviews (AIO) into the core search interface. Contrast that with Fishkin’s estimates that ChatGPT, Google’s most popular AI competitor, has just 0.25% of the search market, compared to Google’s share which is estimated at 93.57%. Though ChatGPT’s growth numbers have been impressive, the platform’s usage as a search tool is still dwarfed by Google, and in fact has not yet reached the levels of minority players like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.

What This Means  With all the talk in the marketing world about the rise of AI platforms and the need for brands to control how they appear in AI-powered responses, this study provides some much needed perspective. While it’s quite true that brands should be aware of this emerging trend, they should also keep in mind the actual habits of the consumers they want to reach. Clearly, more consumers than ever are using Google to fulfill their search needs, meaning that brands need most of all to understand how they can influence their appearance in AIO and in the multiple AI-powered feature that Google has introduced into the local search experience.

Google Announces AIO Expansion, AI Mode as Search Alternative

The News Speaking of Google’s growth, a recent company announcement claims that with its “new AI features, people are using Google Search more than ever as they get help with new and more complex questions.” This is Google’s justification for introducing further improvements to AIO, such as the integration of Gemini 2.0, which will allow for capabilities like coding and advanced math. AIO will also be available to teen users and those who aren’t logged in to a Google account.

More significantly, Google is launching AI Mode as an experimental feature in Labs. AI Mode presents itself to the user as a tab like Google Images or Google News, where the user can enable a full AI-powered interface somewhat like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s own Gemini. Google points out some distinguishing features, though, such as the fact that AI Mode is able to access live web results as well as “fresh, real-time sources like the Knowledge Graph, info about the real world, and shopping data for billions of products.” Google also describes a “query fan-out technique” that lets AI Mode conduct multiple simultaneous searches which are then summarized in a coherent response.

Intriguingly, Google notes that AI Mode is “rooted in our core quality and ranking systems”; that link takes you to a PDF doc which explains that AIO and AI Mode are different from typical LLMs in that they work “in tandem with our existing Search systems – like our quality and ranking systems and the Google Knowledge Graph.”

The feature is available for now only to Google One subscribers on the $19.99/month AI Premium plan.

What This Means It will take a broad rollout of AI Mode to determine whether users find it to be a compelling alternative to search, but if and when that broad rollout occurs, we can be confident that it will be the most prominent AI-powered interface most consumers will encounter in their daily lives. Google is carefully building on the success of AIO (after early problems) and looking to introduce immersive AI to a broader public than any pure AI platform is currently able to reach.

Justice Department Still Wants to Break Up Google

The News In a court filing on March 7, the Trump Justice Department reinforced the push from the Biden administration to penalize Google for anti-competitive practices by forcing the company to sell off the Chrome browser, amongst other penalties. Though there were slight differences in the new filing that, for instance, would allow Google more leeway in the development of AI technologies, on the whole the new Justice Department is signaling that it wants to pursue a significant action that could be as momentous, in modern terms, as the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s.

What This Means The court is due to issue a ruling on the Google case after a two-week hearing in April. If the ruling goes against Google, the company will certainly appeal. Meta and Apple face similar antitrust cases in the coming months.