My Google usage declined 23% after ChatGPT

The rise of "CEO": chat engine optimization

As I've commented on a few times in this newsletter, I've started using AI extensively in my day-to-day life--most notably ChatGPT, but also Github CoPilot, DallE-2, and other tools. I've had a growing sense I've started using chatGPT more than Google. As an engineer, I wanted numbers of course, not just intuition!

The results: my Google usage has declined by 23%, and in fact, I do use ChatGPT more than Google now!

Here is a chart of the data:

This chart shows the number of URL visits per day to either google.com or openai.com. I gathered these numbers by analyzing my browser history (which is synced across devices thanks to Apple's iCloud service). To do this analysis, I had ChatGPT write the SQL and Python code needed to get the data from the internals of Safari. Interestingly, ChatGPT needed a short dialogue to get to the correct query (it had the wrong database schema initially), but the Python parsing code worked immediately with no modifications.

The ChatGPT numbers are very understated--each visit to openai.com can be fairly long and involve multiple queries. While technically, I have slightly fewer visits to openai.com than google now (53 average visits a day to google.com versus 46 to openai.com), given the usage model of ChatGPT, I'm actually using the AI tools more than Google.  

That’s not all…