After decades of relying on Google’s ten blue links to find everything from travel tips to jeans, consumers are quickly adapting to a completely new format: AI chatbots that do the searching for them.
According to new research from Adobe, AI search has become a significant traffic channel for retailers. The company analyzed “more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites” through its analytics platform, and conducted a survey of “more than 5,000 U.S. respondents” to better understand how people are using AI.
The report says AI search referrals surged 1,300 percent during the 2024 holiday season compared to 2023, with Cyber Monday seeing a 1,950 percent jump. While these are dramatic increases, it’s somewhat expected, since AI search was still in its nascency last year.
What’s more interesting is the engagement metrics: Users who are referred from AI search compared to traditional referrals (like a standard Google or Bing search) tend to stay on the site 8 percent longer, browse through different pages 12 percent more, and are 23 percent less likely to just visit the link and leave (or “bounce”). This could suggest that AI tools are directing people to more relevant pages than traditional search.
There’s also Perplexity, a fledgling startup now valued at a whopping $9 billion, which provides AI search via a chatbot (with advertising baked in) and has been mired in controversy. Last June, a Forbes editor alleged that the startup had wholesale plagiarized his team’s reporting thanks to a new Perplexity feature that generates a web page on any topic. At the time, CEO Aravind Srinivas said that the product “has rough edges” and it “will improve” with feedback over time. Not everyone took kindly to that defense: Forbes threatened to sue, while News Corp is actively suing for copyright infringement.
Despite early issues, OpenAI also launched its own search feature last year within its flagship product, ChatGPT. Perhaps learning from the mistakes made by Google and Perplexity, OpenAI announced the launch of its search feature as a prototype, hoping to reduce the number of weird edge cases that could potentially go viral. It also came with a slew of media partnerships (including Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge) and a press release that emphasized how publishers had control of how their work surfaced in ChatGPT.
For now, it seems like AI search is here to stay — and consumers are molding it to their needs. The accompanying survey by Adobe of 5,000 consumers found that 39 percent of those respondents use AI search for online shopping, 55 percent use it to do research (which I’ve also said is my main use case), and 47 percent use it to find recommendations on what to buy. These kinds of statistics tend to make advertisers salivate. But while Perplexity and Google bake in ads alongside AI search results, OpenAI doesn’t. Per TechCrunch, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the company would put ads in ChatGPT as a “last resort” because he thinks “ads-plus-AI is sort of uniquely unsettling.” CFO Sarah Friar has said the startup was considering implementing ads (which a company spokesperson later walked back). While OpenAI could really use the ad revenue since its products are cash-burning machines, that isn’t the future consumers want — and the lack of ads might be what’s drawing them to AI search in the first place.
Even though it’s still early days, AI search has clearly caught consumers’ attention as they experiment with this new way to find things online. Many critics feel traditional search has been broken for years, clogged with ads and SEO spam. AI search is emerging as the potential fix — if it can avoid the same corrupting forces.
