Users still googled before. Now they just move to chatbots. Regular people don't really notice the search degradation as much and enshittification helps Google, as revenues kept going up. Chatbots are an existential threat since they will add ads and that's where Google's ad revenue dies.
Did any users actually move to chatbots? By which I don't mean the 0.001% of tech nerds who buy chatgpt subscriptions, but in aggregate did a meaningful number of google searchers defect to chatgpt or
other llm services? I really doubt that. Data would be interesting but there's a credibility problem...
Yes. People do use them and they trust them, unfortunately.
Tech nerds know what ChatGPT is, they know llm limits somewhat and they know it's hallucinating. Normal people do not - for them is a magical all knowing oracle.
> People do use them and they trust them, unfortunately.
Yep, and it’s hard to communicate that to them. It’s hard to accurately describe even to someone familiar with the context.
I don’t think “trust” is the right word. Sitting here on 19 Nov 2025, I do in fact trust LLMs to reason. I don’t trust LLMs to be truthful.
If I ask for a fact, I always consider what I’d lose if that fact were wrong.
If I ask for reasoning, I provide the facts that I believe are required to make the decision. I then double-check that reasoning by inverting the prompt and comparing the output in the other direction. For more critical decisions, I make sure I use different models, from different providers, with completely separate context. If I’ve done all that, I think I can honestly say that I trust it.
These days, I would describe it as “I don’t trust AI to distinguish truth”
I don’t have data for it, and would love to dig it up at some point. My head is too deep in a problem at the moment to make space for it …but I did just add it to my task list via ChatGPT :)
Anecdotally, I believe they did.
My wife is decidedly not a tech nerd, but had her own ChatGPT subscription without my input before I switched us over to a business account.
My mother is 58, and a retired executive for a “traditional” Fortune 100 company. She’s competent with MS productivity tools and the software she used for work, but has little interest outside that. She also had her own ChatGPT subscription.
Both of them were using it for at least a large subset of what they’d previously used Google for.
Gemini, ChatGPT and probably all of the others have free tiers that can be used as an enhanced web search. And they're probably better in many regards, since they do the aggregation directly. Plus regular users don't really check sources, can't really verify the trustworthiness of a website, etc, so their results were always hit or miss.
As someone who deeply dislikes using chatbots for information there is a lot of stuff that is easily and reliably anwsered by GPT
You must know the limitations of the medium but searching for how much and at what temperature should i bake my broccoli is so fucking annoying to search on google
