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.
Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask.
I’m a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who studies information retrieval, 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.
Change in searching
The biggest change isn’t that other tools have vanished. It’s 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 grown to 800 million. That makes it one of the most widely used consumer technologies on the planet.
Surveys show that this use isn’t just curiosity – it reflects a real change in behavior. A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, 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 say they use it to search for information, making this the most common AI use case. The number rises to 74% for the under-30 crowd.
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.
For years, Google was the default for everything from “how to reset my router” to “explain the debt ceiling.” These basic informational queries made up a huge portion of search traffic. But these quick, clarifying, everyday “what does this mean” questions are the ones ChatGPT now answers faster and more cleanly than a page of links.
And people have noticed. A 2025 U.S. consumer survey found that 55% of respondents now use OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini AI chatbots about tasks they previously would have asked Google search to 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 growing 165 times faster than traditional searches, and about 13 million U.S. adults have already made generative AI their go-to tool for online discovery.
This doesn’t mean people have stopped “Googling,” 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.
At the same time, Google isn’t…
