AI chatbots have barely managed to make a dent in search engine traffic, according to a report from SEO analytics firm OneLittleWeb. The firm's data reveals that between April 2024 and March 2025, the top ten search engines in the world received 155 billion visitors, while the top ten AI chatbots had 4 billion web visits per month. Overall, the data shows that search engines drew 34 times the traffic of chatbots, and as is the case with new technologies, are growing at a faster pace.
Top 10 Chatbots See Visits Grow By 81% Annually In March 2025 While Search Engines Remain Flat
According to OneLittleWeb's data, Google remains the indisputable king for attracting web traffic. While the top ten search engines saw 1.8 trillion visits in March 2025, Google accounted for 1.6 trillion. The second winner was Microsoft's Bing, which managed to attract 60 billion total visits. Year-over-year in March, Google's visits dropped by 1.4%, while Bing grew its visits by 27.7%.
On the other hand, web traffic visits to all chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, were a little less than the total visits to Bing. The data shows that total visits to AI chatbots sat at 55.2 billion in March, out of which OpenAI's ChatGPT accounted for 87% of the share. ChatGPT ranked first with 47.7 billion with China's DeepSeek and Google's tied for second place with 1.7 billion visits, each. DeepSeek was still the fastest grower, as while ChatGPT and Gemini traffic grew by 67% and 41%, DeepSeek's traffic jumped by 113,007%.
In terms of total visits, search engines drew 34 times more traffic than AI bots, which accounted for just 3% of all search engine traffic, according to OneLittleWeb. Naturally, the smaller percentage of visits and the nascent nature of AI also meant that AI chatbots significantly outpaced search engines regarding visits. AI visits grew by 80.9% annually in March while search engine traffic dropped by a hairline 0.51%.
Search engines also led AI in terms of average monthly and daily visits. Their average monthly and daily visits in March were 155 billion and 5.5 billion, respectively. On the other hand, AI chatbots attracted 4.6 billion average monthly visits and 233 million average daily visits. However, not all search engines are performing well, with Yahoo seeing the biggest decline annually in March. The site drew 41.3 billion visitors in March, for a sharp 22.5% annual drop.
For the AI chatbots, starting from May 2024, the number of visitors has grown consistently each month and is up from 3.1 billion visits in May to 7 billion visits in March. On the flip side, between April 2023 to March 2024, chatbot visits dropped to 2.1 billion in August and grew only slightly to 2.9 billion in March 2024.
Chatbot visit growth has accelerated over the latest rolling 12 month period with sharp monthly jumps of 17% and 22% in September 2024 and February 2025. As for search engine monthly visit growth, the trends are far more dynamic.
The number of visitors to search engines dipped to 148 billion in February 2024 and sharply recovered to 161 billion this February. Additionally, search engine visits have been on a constant growth trend since November 2024, when the bottom of 155 billion visits was reached.
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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