Is AI Search Just Google? What the Numbers Say for Australian Businesses (2026)

Last updated: 20 October 2026

Is AI search just Google? For most Australian businesses, largely yes. The AI that most people meet is Google’s: AI Overviews, which Google says has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode, which Google says passed 1 billion monthly users. ChatGPT is huge too, but only a slice of its use looks like search, so winning visibility in Google’s AI is the highest-volume first move.

That is the short version. The longer version matters, because these figures get thrown around loosely, and because the wrong conclusion (ignore ChatGPT, or ignore Google) costs real enquiries. This guide sets out what Google, OpenAI, SparkToro and Ahrefs have actually published, explains why the numbers are so easy to misread, adds our own measurement of Google AI Mode answers for Australian buying questions, and finishes with a practical plan.

The question was sharpened by Jake Ward’s LinkedIn post in October 2026, arguing that if you think AI search means ChatGPT, you are looking at the wrong chart. We agree with the direction. We have also checked every figure below against its source, and where a number is an estimate rather than an official statistic, we say so.

Is AI search just ChatGPT, or is it mostly Google?

AI search is not just ChatGPT. Google’s AI features reach far more people, because they sit inside the search engine people already use every day, and nobody has to choose to open them.

That is the structural point. ChatGPT is a destination: you open an app or a site and decide to use it. AI Overviews is not a destination. It appears at the top of an ordinary Google results page when Google’s systems decide it adds something. Someone searching for an electrician in Robina or a dentist in Burleigh Heads never decides to “use AI search”. They just search, and an AI answer may be there.

Google’s own documentation describes this plainly. Google Search Central’s guidance on AI features says AI Overviews and AI Mode “may use a ‘query fan-out’ technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources” to build a response, and that AI Mode is helpful for queries needing reasoning or comparison. Both are features of Google Search.

So the useful framing is not “Google versus AI”. For a local service business it is closer to: Google Search now has an AI layer on top, and that layer is where a growing share of the questions are answered.

How many people use Google’s AI features?

Google reports more than a billion monthly users for each of its AI search surfaces, and over 2.5 billion for AI Overviews. These are Google’s own statements, made in 2026, and they are the strongest evidence in this debate because they come from the company that runs the product.

Two details are worth pulling out. First, Google says AI Mode is “driving an incremental increase in Search queries overall”, and that it sends billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features. AI answers are not simply replacing clicks, according to Google. We cannot verify the click claim independently, and you should treat it as Google’s account, but it is the account of the party that measures it.

Second, the 5 trillion figure is annual. Dividing it by 365 gives roughly 13.7 billion searches a day. That division is our arithmetic, not a Google statistic, and it is only a rough average. It is useful for scale: even if only a fraction of those searches show an AI answer, the numbers dwarf any standalone chatbot’s search-like activity.

Gemini sits slightly apart. The Gemini app is Google’s assistant, separate from the AI answers inside Search. Count it as extra reach for Google’s AI, not as the same thing as AI Overviews.

How does ChatGPT compare?

ChatGPT is very large, but its usage is broader than search. OpenAI says ChatGPT has more than 1.2 billion weekly users (The Verge reported the milestone on 29 September 2026), and OpenAI’s own research suggests a minority of that activity is about finding information.

OpenAI’s own usage study how people use the product. In it, “Seeking Information” grew from 14% to 24% of all usage between July 2024 and July 2025. That is a notable rise, and it tells you ChatGPT is increasingly used like a search engine. It also tells you that roughly three quarters of use was something else: writing help, practical guidance, coding and so on. That study is a year old, so treat it as a snapshot rather than the current split.

This is the heart of the confusion. A headline user count for a general-purpose assistant mixes writing a cover letter, debugging a spreadsheet and asking where to find a plumber. A headline user count for Google’s AI Overviews is entirely about search. They are not the same denominator.

An independent dataset points the same way. In March 2026, SparkToro and Datos analysed 41 websites with significant search activity in the US. Google accounted for 73.7% of desktop searches across those domains in Q4 2025, and AI tools made up 3.2%. The study is US desktop only and covers a defined set of sites, so it is not a measure of Australia. But 73.7 divided by 3.2 is about 23, the same order of magnitude as the claims you will see on social media.

Where do the “30 times more” claims come from, and can you trust them?

The “30 times” figure is an estimate. In the post that prompted this article, Jake Ward estimated roughly 5.9 billion Google AI searches a day against roughly 200 million a day across the major AI platforms combined. 5.9 divided by 0.2 is about 30. Those daily numbers are his estimates, built from public data, not figures published by Google or OpenAI.

We are not criticising that. Estimates are all anyone has for daily AI search volume, because Google publishes monthly users, not daily queries, and OpenAI publishes weekly users. What we can say is that two independent routes land in the same region: the SparkToro desktop ratio of about 23 to 1, and Ward’s estimate of about 30 to 1. Neither is exact, and neither should be quoted as a precise multiple. The direction is the part to rely on.

Here is a quick guide to how metrics differ, because mixing them is the most common error:

• Monthly active users count anyone who used the product at least once in a month. Google reports AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini this way.
• Weekly users count anyone active in a seven day window. OpenAI reports ChatGPT this way. Weekly users cannot be set side by side with monthly users without adjustment.
• Searches or queries per day measure volume, not people. Google publishes an annual figure, and any daily figure is derived.
• Share of searches measures a defined sample. SparkToro’s figure is share across 41 US domains, not all of the internet.

How often do AI Overviews actually appear?

Increasingly often, especially for questions and for searches that name a brand. Ahrefs analysed 232.8 million US desktop Google search crawls from July to September 2026 and found AI Overviews on 82.91% of branded keyword results as at 29 September 2026. For non-branded keywords the monthly average rose from 73.5% in July to 74.7% in August and 78.3% in September.

Read that carefully. It is US desktop data, drawn from the keyword set Ahrefs tracks, so it describes a particular sample and not Australian search overall. It also covers a period when the keyword set may have differed from earlier studies, so it is a snapshot, not a trend line comparing different years. What it does show is that, within that sample, an AI Overview is now the normal state of a Google results page, not the exception.

Google itself adds an important qualifier. Its documentation says AI Overviews “are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don’t trigger.” Both statements can be true: appearance is frequent in some query sets and absent in others. The practical lesson is to check your own priority queries, not to assume.

What does this mean in Australia?

In Australia, the AI layer arrived on Google first. Google rolled out AI Mode in English in Australia from 8 October 2025, per Google’s Australian announcement, so Australian users have had it for about a year.

For a business on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane or anywhere else, this changes where the first impression happens. Someone asking “best electrician near Robina” or “family dentist Burleigh Heads” meets an AI-composed answer that names businesses, quotes ratings and lists services before they see a single blue link. If you are not in that answer, you may not be in the decision.

The figures above are global or US, and we are careful not to present them as Australian statistics. We cannot give you an Australian split, and we would be wary of anyone who says they can. What we can measure ourselves is what Google AI Mode returns for Australian buying questions, and that is the next section.

What does Google AI Mode actually recommend for Australian buying questions?

When we asked Google AI Mode for local businesses, it built its answers from Google’s own business data: ratings, review counts, suburbs and listed services. This is first-party data from Titan Blue’s AI Search Index, and it is a small sample, so read it as an illustration, not a market survey.

Here is the method. Our tracker types real buying prompts into Google AI Mode in a fresh browser session and records every business named, every rating displayed and the signals the answer leaned on. We then tally what came back. The instrument is Google AI Mode, run on specific days in October 2026. It is not ChatGPT, and it is not a ranking of businesses.

Across 17 runs between 7 and 18 October 2026 that returned a usable answer, covering 27 usable AI Mode answers in total, our classifier recorded a Google review rating as a signal in 22 answers. A signal from the business’s website content was recorded in 3. The signal tags are our own classification of the answer text, so they are approximate, but the pattern was consistent.

The deepest single run was six prompts asking for an accountant in Melbourne on 18 October 2026. All six returned usable answers and named 16 distinct firms. 95% of the recommendations showed a quoted Google rating. Every one of the six answers recorded a rating, a review count, a suburb and listed services as signals. A website-content signal appeared in one of the six.

What does that tell a business owner? The AI is citing the Google data layer first. For local searches, your Google Business Profile, your review record and your location data are the inputs that most visibly shaped these answers, and your website’s job is to confirm and enrich them. Your site still matters, since Google’s AI draws on the web to build an answer. But the order of work is not “ignore Google, chase ChatGPT”. It is the opposite.

We also run a weekly tracker on one prompt for our own category. In the Meta Ads agency post we published on 19 October, we reported that Titan Blue was named in none of 8 usable weekly AI Mode answers between 28 August and 18 October 2026, so we are firmly inside the same problem we are describing.

Why Google first? The compounding logic

Google first is the sensible order because the same work feeds every other AI surface, and Google’s surface is the biggest. If you make a page easy to crawl, clear to read and well supported by trusted sources, you improve your chances in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The same page is also easier for other systems to retrieve and quote.

We should be careful about the strength of that last claim. How ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity pick sources varies and is not fully public, and we have no verified, current measurement that a Google win transfers to them. It is a reasonable working assumption, and a cheap one to act on, but it is an assumption.

The cost logic still holds. Fixing a slow page, adding clear answers and cleaning up your business listing are jobs that benefit people, Google and any other crawler at once. There is no second “AI version” of your website to maintain. Our AEO web design guide covers how we structure a site so one build serves all of them.

How do you get into AI Overviews and AI Mode?

You get into AI Overviews and AI Mode the same way you rank in Google: be technically eligible, be genuinely helpful and be trusted. Google states this directly. Google Search Central’s guidance on AI features says: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”

That sentence is worth keeping in front of you whenever someone sells a secret AI trick. It does not mean nothing can be done. It means the work is the strong version of good search practice. Here is how we apply it, as a checklist for a local business:

1. Make sure the page can be indexed. Pages must be crawlable, indexable and eligible to show a snippet. Check your robots rules, canonical tags and that your key pages are not blocked.
2. Answer the question in the first paragraph. AI answers lift short, direct statements. Put the answer before the story. This post opens with its answer for that reason.
3. Cover the sub-questions on the page. Google says AI features use query fan-out, issuing related searches across subtopics. A page that covers cost drivers, process, timing and comparison is more likely to match one of those sub-searches than a thin page that only covers one.
4. Target question-style queries. Google’s documentation describes AI Mode as built for nuanced, multi-part questions. Write headings as questions people actually ask, and answer them in the opening sentence.
5. Get your entity straight. Name, address, phone, opening hours and services should match across your website, your Google Business Profile and major directories. Add accurate structured data, as we explain in schema markup in website design.
6. Earn mentions from trusted sources. Reviews, local press, industry bodies and partner sites corroborate who you are. This is the oldest SEO principle and it still decides who gets named.
7. Measure it. Search your priority queries in Google, including AI Mode, on a regular schedule and record who is named and why. A short, repeatable list beats a one-off check.

One note on structured data. Schema markup helps Google and other systems understand a page’s entities, but Google’s documentation does not say it is a requirement for AI features, and it retired FAQ rich results in May 2026. We still mark up FAQ content because it is useful for machine understanding, but we do not present it as a ranking or rich-result tactic. See our guide to schema markup in website design for what to mark up and why.

Does winning on Google help with ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity?

It is likely to help, but that is not proven, so treat it as a sound bet rather than a guarantee. The reasoning is that these systems need sources to quote, and the well-structured, widely referenced pages that Google favours are also the pages other systems tend to find and trust.

That is a hypothesis, and we would rather label it than dress it up. What we do know is practical. Your content has to be accessible without logging in, clear enough to quote and consistent with what other sites say about you. We cover the ChatGPT side in detail in our guide to web design for ChatGPT visibility.

There are also differences. ChatGPT users often arrive with a task, a draft or an open question, not a local buying need. For a Gold Coast tradie, café or clinic, local intent lives overwhelmingly in Google and Maps. For a software company or a national content publisher, other assistants may matter more earlier. Know your audience before you split your effort.

Which businesses should still care about ChatGPT?

Businesses whose customers research with an assistant before they ever search should care now. ChatGPT is a real discovery route for complex, considered purchases: software, professional services, B2B and anything involving comparison and explanation.

It also matters for brand. Whether or not ChatGPT drives traffic to you, it may describe you. If it gets your services, location or reputation wrong, people carry that into their decision. Checking how you are described is cheap, and correcting it is mostly the same entity work described above.

A fair way to split attention for a typical local business is:

• Foundation, first: Google Search, Google Business Profile and Google’s AI features.
• Second layer: Maps and review platforms that feed your Google presence.
• Monitoring layer: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, tested for accuracy and mentions on a regular schedule.

Our answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation services follow that same order. If you want to see where your own site stands, our free AI Ready Check reads your pages the way an AI system does.

What should a Gold Coast business do this month?

Do four things this month, in order: check how Google’s AI answers your priority questions, fix your Google Business Profile, rewrite your top pages answer-first, and set up a monthly check. None needs a rebuild.

1. Test your top five questions. Type the questions a customer would ask into Google, including AI Mode where available, from a normal browser. Note whether an AI answer appears, who is named and what details are quoted.
2. Fix the business profile. Confirm your categories, services, hours, photos and description. Reply to reviews. Our own data suggests this is the data AI Mode leaned on most for local searches.
3. Rewrite your most important page. Lead with the answer, add a short table or list where it fits, and give each sub-question its own heading. Add a small FAQ with real customer questions.
4. Check the technical basics. Page speed, mobile layout, indexability and accurate markup. These are the foundations Google’s documentation points to.
5. Repeat monthly. Record results in a simple sheet: query, date, whether an AI answer appeared, who was named. A pattern beats a snapshot.

None of this is exotic, and that is the point. The best AI search strategy in 2026 is mostly disciplined local SEO, plus answer-first content and clean entity data. If you want help doing it well, our website design and search engine optimisation work are built around exactly this.

What are the limits of these numbers?

The limits are significant, and an honest article should list them. Here is what these figures cannot tell you:

• They are not Australian splits. Most of the usage figures are global, and the SparkToro and Ahrefs data are US desktop.
• They are company-reported. Google and OpenAI describe their own products, and the metrics differ in period and definition.
• They change fast. Each figure here is dated, and several will be out of date within months.
• Presence is not traffic. An AI Overview appearing is not the same as a click, and being named is not the same as being chosen.
• Our own sample is small. 27 usable AI Mode answers across 17 runs is an illustration, and the prompts were not a random sample of Australian searches.

If a source gives you a precise AI search market share for Australia with no method attached, be sceptical. We would rather give you a direction we can defend than a figure we cannot.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AI search just Google?

For most local and consumer searches, largely yes. Google reports over 2.5 billion monthly active users for AI Overviews and over 1 billion for AI Mode, and both live inside the search engine people already use. ChatGPT is large but a minority of its use is search-like.

How many people use AI Overviews?

Google said in May 2026 that AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users. That is a monthly figure reported by Google, so it should not be compared directly with ChatGPT’s weekly users.

Is ChatGPT bigger than Google AI Mode?

On total users, ChatGPT reports more than 1.2 billion weekly users and Google reports more than 1 billion monthly users for AI Mode. The metrics differ, and ChatGPT covers many non-search tasks. For search-like activity, the evidence points to Google being far larger.

Is AI Mode available in Australia?

Yes. Google announced AI Mode in English for Australia on 8 October 2025.

Do I need special optimisation to appear in AI Overviews?

No. Google’s Search Central guidance says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations are necessary. Standard SEO best practice applies: indexable pages, helpful content and clear, accurate information.

Should I stop caring about ChatGPT?

No, but sequence it. Build your Google foundations first, then monitor how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini describe your business, particularly if your customers research complex purchases with an assistant.

How do I check if Google’s AI mentions my business?

Search your priority questions in Google, including AI Mode, from a normal browser, and record who is named and what is quoted. Repeat monthly. Our free AI Ready Check also reviews how your site reads to AI systems.

Next steps for your search visibility