OpenAI's Adam Fry: “ChatGPT search is now 20% of Google’s

Discovery used to mean search rankings and a review page people clicked through. That pipe is shrinking, and the places people find your product now are answer engines, forums, and a streaming tab that reads their mood. Let me catch you up on what moved and what to put on your dashboard.

The deep cut

• Discovery now runs through answers, not links. OpenAI's Adam Fry said ChatGPT search volume equals 20% of Google's.
• Split branded from unbranded or you fool yourself. HubSpot's blended 34% visibility hid a 20% unbranded rate where strangers meet you.
• Third parties write your reviews for you. Reddit Reviews turns 10,000 products' comment threads into pros, cons, and sentiment scores.

The pipe is moving to answers

The clearest signal came from a press event, where OpenAI's Adam Fry said ChatGPT search volume now equals 20% of Google's. For scale, Bing hit about 3% market share after more than a decade of trying. This grew fast.

That matters because the answer sits above the links. Pew tracked 900 U.S. adults and found people clicked a traditional result 8% of the time when a Google AI summary appeared, versus 15% when it didn't. They clicked a link inside the summary 1% of the time. Your rankings can hold while your traffic drops, because the user got the answer and never scrolled.

Two shoppers, one blended number that lies

Here is the trap that burns teams. There are two kinds of questions. Someone asks "Is HubSpot good for small business email?" That's branded. Someone asks "What's the best email tool?" That's unbranded, and it's where new buyers meet you or never do.

Mixing them hides the problem. HubSpot's own example tracks 500 answers: branded visibility at 90%, unbranded at 20%, which blends to a comfortable 34%. Add more branded prompts and the blended score climbs while discovery stays flat. Report the two piles side by side. If someone wants one number, lead with the unbranded rate, because it's the hard one to move.

And run it as a routine, not a one-off. SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai found less than a 1-in-100 chance of getting the same brand list twice on ChatGPT. One check tells you nothing. Track the same prompts weekly and read the trend.

Your reviews now live on other people's pages

The answer about your product often doesn't come from your site. Reddit launched Reddit Reviews, which uses AI to pull comment threads into product pages with pros, cons, and a positive-mixed-negative sentiment score across 10,000 items. Reddit told The Verge that 40% of conversations on the platform are commercial.

This shows up in the benchmarks too. In Financial Services, NerdWallet and Bankrate out-cite Bank of America and JPMorgan combined. When third parties shape your category's answer, your blog can't move the number alone. You have to show up where the conversations already happen.

The flip side: Reddit is a target for fake reviews. Moderators told The Verge they've caught brands trying to astroturf beauty products, weight-loss apps, and musicians. If you game it, you risk the moderators and the spam detection, not just a bad look.

Even the couch is a discovery surface

Discovery isn't only text prompts. Netflix launched AI Discover, a tab where you pick a mood like "Something Light" or "Scare Me" and it surfaces titles. Netflix calls it a "test kitchen" for new ways to find things, running on an intelligence layer that learns from what you tell it in real time.

The pattern is the same across all of these. The interface is becoming a conversation, not a list. Fry put it plainly: "You're talking to a canvas." For your team, that means the question shifts from "where do we rank" to "do we get named when someone describes what they want."

Three questions for your team

• Do we report branded and unbranded visibility as two numbers, and can we say our unbranded rate out loud right now?
• When our AI visibility drops, can we tell a market-wide shift from our own slip before anyone rewrites a single page?
• Which third-party sites and forums shape the answers in our category, and what's our plan to show up there instead of only on our own blog?