New information exhibits Google retains customers on its website longer. Guests now make 10 clicks on Google’s website earlier than leaving for an additional web site.
This discovering comes from a 13-month research evaluating Google and ChatGPT visitors patterns.
Google Retains Customers In, ChatGPT Sends Them Out
Tyler Einberger of Momentic analyzed Similarweb information displaying that Google’s “pages per go to” metric has climbed to 10 as of March, a giant soar from earlier than.
Picture Credit score: Momentic.What does this imply? Customers spend extra clicks on Google’s search outcomes than on different web sites.
The report explains:
“Rising ‘Pages per Go to’ for Google.com is an indicator that customers are spending extra clicks inside Google’s search outcomes (SERPs). Since most SERP interactions—like interacting with SERP options, paging, refining searches, or clicking photographs—change the URL however preserve guests on Google’s area.”
Google nonetheless sends essentially the most general visitors to exterior web sites.
Google generated 175.5 million outgoing visits in March in comparison with ChatGPT’s 57.6 million. This represents a 66.4% enhance for Google in comparison with final yr.
The Effectivity Hole
ChatGPT is extra environment friendly at sending folks to different web sites.
The numbers inform the story:
- ChatGPT generates 1.4 exterior web site visits per person
- Google produces simply 0.6 visits per person
This implies ChatGPT customers are 2.3 instances extra more likely to go to exterior web sites than Google customers, despite the fact that Google’s viewers is about 6.8 instances bigger.
The SERP Retention Technique
Google’s growing in-platform clicks match its technique of increasing search options. These options present speedy solutions with out requiring customers to go to different web sites.
Google is succeeding at two objectives:
- Remaining the net’s main visitors supply
- Retaining customers on Google’s properties longer
Whereas Google despatched extra outgoing visitors in early 2025, its viewers barely grew. This exhibits a posh relationship between protecting customers and referring them elsewhere.
What This Means
For website positioning execs and entrepreneurs, this development creates new challenges and alternatives:
- With customers spending extra time on Google’s interfaces, capturing consideration within the first display view issues greater than ever.
- Concentrate on showing in featured snippets, information panels, and different SERP parts to keep up visibility as conventional natural clicks grow to be more durable to get.
- Think about ChatGPT and different AI platforms as further visitors sources since they refer extra guests per person.
- Customers now work together with a number of SERP options earlier than clicking a web site, requiring higher attribution fashions and content material methods.
The Broader AI Search Market
Whereas Google and ChatGPT lead the dialog, different AI search platforms are rising quick.
Perplexity grew 110.7% month-over-month in March. Grok grew 48.1% and Claude grew 23%.
These newer platforms may change present visitors patterns as they achieve customers, although the report doesn’t analyze their referral effectivity intimately.
Google stays the most important visitors supply general. Nevertheless, its rising “walled backyard” strategy means entrepreneurs ought to watch these developments and diversify the place their visitors comes from.
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