ChatGPT vs Google: Why AI Is Becoming the Full Customer Journey

Two Systems, Converging

Google and ChatGPT started with different strengths. But they are converging. AI platforms are expanding from research into transactions. Google is expanding from transactions into AI-powered discovery through Gemini and AI Mode. The direction is clear: the platform that handles the full journey wins.

The Volume Story: Google's Scale Remains Enormous

Google's dominance in raw volume is not a debate. It holds roughly 90% of global search market share and processes billions of searches every day. No other platform comes close to that throughput.

But here's where it gets interesting. For the first time since 2015, Google's market share dipped below 90% in late 2024. A few percentage points might sound small, but when applied to billions of daily searches, that represents hundreds of millions of queries migrating to new platforms every day. The trend line matters more than the snapshot.

The Depth Story: ChatGPT Captures the Decision-Making Moment

Where ChatGPT falls short on volume, it more than compensates with depth. Users are not scanning a list of blue links. They're having a conversation, asking follow-up questions, comparing options, weighing tradeoffs, and forming preferences. By the time the session ends, they've often already decided what they want. They just need to find where to get it.

This is the critical insight: ChatGPT captures the opinion-formation moment. And what makes this so powerful is that the transaction can now happen immediately after. With a native AI app, the user does not need to leave the conversation to buy, book, or sign up. The opinion-formation moment and the transaction moment collapse into one.

The Behavioral Shift Is Already Happening

This is not a future prediction. Mainstream consumers have already changed how they discover businesses. The businesses taking AI presence seriously right now recognize that customers are already forming preferences inside AI conversations.

Who Is Using ChatGPT for Discovery (and How)

According to an Adobe survey of 800 consumers, 77% of ChatGPT users have used it as a search engine at least once. This is not an early-adopter cohort anymore. It's mainstream.

More striking: 24% of users now reach for ChatGPT before Google for certain types of queries. These are not tech enthusiasts running experiments. These are people who have formed a new habit. For some questions, AI is the first stop.

The queries that pull users toward ChatGPT tend to be research-oriented: “What is the best CRM for a 10-person team?” or “Should I hire a fractional CFO or a full-time accountant?” These are the questions that precede buying decisions, and they are increasingly happening inside AI conversations, not on search result pages.

What They Are Asking AI vs. What They Ask Google

The query composition tells the story. According to Advanced Web Ranking, ChatGPT queries are 93.7% informational: users seeking explanations, comparisons, and recommendations. Only 0.1% are transactional: users looking to buy something right now.

Google, by contrast, has a far more balanced distribution across informational, navigational, and transactional intent. It still owns the “buy now” moment.

The 0.1% transactional figure reflects where AI queries are today. But native AI apps are closing this gap by enabling transactions inside conversations. ChatGPT dominates research and opinion-formation. And with native AI apps, the transaction is now possible inside the same conversation. The gap between research and transaction on AI platforms is closing fast.

Google's advantage has been the transaction moment. But its model depends on sending users to external websites, each with its own UX, its own checkout flow, its own friction. AI platforms are designed to eliminate that friction entirely.

The Invisible Brands Problem

If Google rankings and AI recommendations drew from the same pool, this would be straightforward. They don't.

Why Your Google Rankings Don't Translate to AI

As we covered in The AI Visibility Gap, the overlap between brands that lead in traditional search and those that AI platforms recommend is surprisingly low. More than half of Google's top-ranked businesses are absent from AI recommendations, and vice versa.

The reasons are structural. AI platforms use different source hierarchies, different ranking signals, and produce different output formats. Google prioritizes backlinks, domain authority, and keyword relevance. ChatGPT draws from third-party directories, reviews, Reddit discussions, and authoritative content. Being #1 on Google does not mean ChatGPT will recommend you.

Ahrefs quantified this disconnect: 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero organic visibility in Google. The pages AI trusts most are often completely absent from traditional search results. This is not a minor overlap gap; it is a structural divergence in what these two systems consider authoritative. BrightEdge found that ChatGPT mentions brands 3.2x more often than it cites them with actual links. AI shapes purchasing decisions without driving the trackable clicks that Google Analytics measures. A business can be heavily influencing customer choices through ChatGPT while its analytics dashboard shows zero AI-referred traffic.

This disconnect goes even deeper than source hierarchies. Even checking whether you are visible on AI platforms is harder than it sounds. Many GEO monitoring tools call the ChatGPT or Gemini API, check if your link appears in the response, and report a score. But the actual AI client experience varies dramatically by user. Each person brings their own conversation history (months or years of past interactions), custom instructions, and location context that change what the AI recommends. SparkToro's January 2026 study confirmed this: 600 volunteers ran 2,961 queries and found less than a 1-in-100 chance that ChatGPT returns the same brand list twice for identical prompts. An API-based visibility score captures only a narrow slice of a fundamentally inconsistent system.

What This Means for Your Business Strategy

The temptation is to treat this as Google vs. AI. That framing misses the point. Both platforms are converging toward the full customer journey. The question is not which one to choose. It is how to capture the journey as it moves into AI.

The Full-Journey Strategy

Google still processes billions of searches. But its role is shifting. Google itself is moving toward AI-powered discovery through Gemini and AI Mode. Even Google recognizes that the future is conversational.

The traditional Google model sends users to third-party websites for transaction. Every site has its own UX, its own checkout flow, its own friction. AI platforms eliminate that friction. A native AI app lets users research, form preferences, and transact in a single conversation.

The businesses building this capability now will capture the full customer journey as it moves into AI. AI presence is not just for the research phase. It is for the entire journey.

Where AI Presence Gives You an Unfair Advantage

Here's where the opportunity is: fewer than half of brands have any GEO strategy. Even fewer have deployed native AI apps. The competitive landscape on AI platforms is wide open compared to any other channel.

Think about what that means. On Google, you're competing against every business that has spent the last 20 years building SEO authority. On paid search, you're bidding against established budgets. On social media, you're fighting algorithmic headwinds.

On AI platforms, the majority of your competitors have not even started. The window for early-mover advantage is still open, but it will not stay open indefinitely.

Why Native AI Apps Change the Equation

A native AI app gives your business controlled, interactive presence across the full customer journey, from research to transaction. When a user asks ChatGPT or Claude for a recommendation, your app surfaces with accurate information, interactive features, and the ability to convert right inside the conversation. The native AI app is not just for being found. It is for closing the deal inside the conversation.

Think of it this way: you would not invest in SEO before you have a website. A native AI app is the equivalent of building your website on AI platforms. GEO optimization comes after.

The difference between passive and active AI presence is the difference between hoping to be mentioned and guaranteeing you are there, with the ability to transact. That's the gap Noodle Seed was built to close, without requiring an engineering team or months of development.

The Timeline: What Happens Next

The split between Google and AI discovery is accelerating, not stabilizing. Understanding the timeline helps you prioritize.

2026: The Window Is Open

Google's market share has already dipped below 90%. Nearly a quarter of ChatGPT users reach for it before Google. The behavioral shift is not a future prediction. It is happening now. That makes 2026 the window to establish AI presence before the competitive landscape hardens.

The businesses that build AI presence now will have compounding advantages: established authority signals, user engagement history, and platform-specific optimization that latecomers will need to build from scratch.

What to Do in the Next Three Weeks

Three concrete actions you can start today:

1. 1.Run an AI presence check. Query ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok about your business category. Document what each platform says, or does not say, about you. Use our AI Presence Check for an instant snapshot across all platforms.
2. 2.Deploy your native AI app. This is your foundation, like building a website. A native app gives your business controlled, interactive presence on ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI platforms. You would not invest in SEO before you have a website. The same logic applies here: build your native AI presence first.
3. 3.Optimize the underlying factors for discoverability. With your native presence established, work on the layers that actually influence AI recommendations: parametric knowledge (what the AI learned during training), application metadata and tool descriptions (how your native app surfaces in discovery), structured data and directory listings, and earned media coverage. Do not get too carried away with any single GEO measurement tool. None of the tools on the market today are accurate. What matters is optimizing the underlying factors across all layers of discoverability, from training data to real-time retrieval to app discovery. The score on any one dashboard is not the goal. The goal is making your business the best answer across every signal the AI weighs.

Frequently Asked Questions About ChatGPT vs Google Discovery