OpenAI's consumer product lead told an audience in New York that ChatGPT now handles roughly one search-like question for every five that Google handles, and that its weekly users grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in two months. The full conversation covers more, but the number that matters to a business is the one next to it: how few visitors ChatGPT sends back.
An answer ends the search, so the visit disappears
A results page is a row of doors. The customer picks one, lands on your website, and you can count them. A chat answer is the room behind the door. It names three or four businesses, says what each is good for, and the customer chooses without opening anything.
That is why a fifth of Google's questions does not mean a fifth of Google's traffic. ChatGPT sends websites well under 1% of the visits that Google and ChatGPT send combined. Google users show the same pull: when a results page opens with an AI summary, people click a regular result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there is no summary. Any place that answers instead of listing breaks the visit as a scorecard.
The directory company followed the customers
The Yellow Pages story shows what that does to people who sell. Yell's website began in 1996, and the printed book kept coming out until 2019. The shops that stayed with the book were paying for a place fewer people looked. Yell moved its own business to where the customers were and sold those shops Google ads, so the directory followed the customers even when its advertisers were slower.
The ChatGPT version has two layers. One is ads: OpenAI began testing them on its free tiers in the United States, and they do not change the answers ChatGPT gives. The other is the answer itself, which cannot be bought. For questions about places, people and prices, ChatGPT looks things up on the web, so the answer is built from what the web already says about you: your own pages, the directory listings that carry your hours, and what customers have written about you.
What a tile shop owner finds in an afternoon
Picture a family tile shop whose website visits have been flat for a year. The owner assumes nothing has changed. She opens ChatGPT and asks the five questions a customer would ask, in the words a customer would use: who sells bathroom tile in her town, who delivers, who is open on Saturday.
She may find that it names a competitor first, and that it says her shop closes at noon on Saturdays because one old directory listing never got updated. Both are things she can fix in an afternoon: correct the listing, put the delivery area and opening hours in plain words on her own site, and ask recent customers to say in their reviews what the shop is good at. Her visit count will not show whether it worked. Asking the same five questions a month later will.
That check costs a few minutes and belongs on the same list as looking at your Google listing. Customers now put about a fifth as many questions to ChatGPT as they put to Google, and the owner who has read the answers knows what those customers were told.