{"id":154150,"date":"2025-11-26T05:48:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T05:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/154150\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T05:48:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T05:48:07","slug":"in-3-years-the-ai-chatbot-has-changed-the-way-people-look-things-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/154150\/","title":{"rendered":"In 3 years the AI chatbot has changed the way people look things up"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Deborah Lee<\/a><\/p>\n

Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they usually did one of three things: typed the question into Google, searched YouTube for a how-to video or shouted desperately at Alexa for help.<\/p>\n

Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who\u00a0studies information retrieval<\/a>, I see that this shift of the tool people reach for first for finding information is at the heart of how ChatGPT has changed everyday technology use.<\/p>\n

Change in searching<\/p>\n

The biggest change isn\u2019t that other tools have vanished. It\u2019s that ChatGPT has become the new front door to information. Within months of its introduction on Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT had 100 million weekly users. By late 2025, that figure had\u00a0grown to 800 million<\/a>. That makes it one of the most widely used consumer technologies on the planet.<\/p>\n

Surveys show that this use isn\u2019t just curiosity \u2013 it reflects a real change in behavior. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that\u00a034% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT<\/a>, roughly double the share found in 2023. Among adults under 30, a clear majority (58%) have tried it. An AP-NORC poll reports that about 60% of U.S. adults who use AI\u00a0say they use it to search for information<\/a>, making this the most common AI use case. The number rises to 74% for the under-30 crowd.<\/p>\n

Traditional search engines are still the backbone of the online information ecosystem, but the kind of searching people do has shifted in measurable ways since ChatGPT entered the scene. People are changing which tool they reach for first.<\/p>\n

For years,\u00a0Google was the default<\/a>\u00a0for everything from \u201chow to reset my router\u201d to \u201cexplain the debt ceiling.\u201d These basic informational queries made up a huge portion of search traffic. But these quick, clarifying, everyday \u201cwhat does this mean\u201d questions are the ones ChatGPT now answers faster and more cleanly than a page of links.<\/p>\n

And people have noticed. A 2025 U.S. consumer survey found that 55% of respondents now use OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT or Google\u2019s Gemini AI chatbots\u00a0about tasks they previously would have asked Google search<\/a>\u00a0to help them with, with even higher usage figures for the U.K. Another analysis of more than 1 billion search sessions found that traffic from generative AI platforms is\u00a0growing 165 times faster than traditional searches<\/a>, and about 13 million U.S. adults have already made generative AI their go-to tool for online discovery.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t mean people have stopped \u201cGoogling,\u201d but it means ChatGPT has peeled off the kinds of questions for which users want a direct explanation instead of a list of links. Curious about a policy update? Need a definition? Want a polite way to respond to an uncomfortable email? ChatGPT is faster, feels more conversational and feels more definitive.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Google isn\u2019t standing still. Its search results look different than they did three years ago because Google started weaving its AI system Gemini directly into the top of the page. The \u201cAI Overview\u201d summaries that appear above traditional search links now instantly answer many simple questions \u2013 sometimes accurately, sometimes less so.<\/p>\n

But either way, many people never scroll past that AI-generated snapshot. This fact combined with the impact of ChatGPT are the reasons the number of \u201czero-click\u201d searches has surged. One report using Similarweb data found that traffic from Google to news sites fell from over 2.3 billion visits in mid-2024\u00a0to under 1.7 billion in May 2025<\/a>, while the share of news-related searches ending in zero clicks jumped from 56% to 69% in one year.<\/p>\n

Google search excels at pointing to a wide range of sources and perspectives, but the results can feel cluttered and designed more for clicks than clarity. ChatGPT, by contract, delivers a more focused and conversational response that prioritizes explanation over ranking. The ChatGPT response can lack the source transparency and multiple viewpoints often found in a Google search.<\/p>\n

In terms of accuracy, both tools can occasionally get it wrong. Google\u2019s strength lies in letting users cross-check multiple sources, while ChatGPT\u2019s accuracy depends heavily on the quality of the prompt and the user\u2019s ability to recognize when a response should be verified elsewhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Deborah Lee Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[36207,6160,4036,367,84182,111,43,139,69,145,255,4139],"class_list":{"0":"post-154150","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ai-chatbot","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","10":"tag-chatgpt","11":"tag-google","12":"tag-information-retrieval","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-world-news","19":"tag-youtube"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}