Google Keeps Search Growing Despite Record Expansion by Claude and Gemini

For two years, analysts and investors have repeated the same scenario: AI chatbots will eventually start pulling search users away from Google, taking billions of advertising dollars with them. The latest BofA Securities report shows the opposite. In June 2026, global traffic to Google Search rose 4 percent year over year, even as rival AI assistants posted triple-digit percentage growth.

What the numbers show

The data comes from a BofA Securities report based on Similarweb, Sensor Tower, and Statcounter statistics, covered by outlets including Rzeczpospolita and US financial news sites that track Alphabet's stock. According to the data, the global daily active user count for Google's app rose 1 percent month over month in June, to 2.2 billion. Over the same period, ChatGPT stayed roughly flat at 440 million daily users, adding just 2 million in a month.

Gemini posted the strongest monthly gain of any tracked AI app, reaching 118 million daily users, an increase of 8 million accounts in a single month. Claude added 2 million users to reach 18 million daily, which, given its low starting base, translates into a 736 percent year-over-year jump in web visits. Meta AI was the only major assistant to lose users in June, shedding around 200,000 daily users.

Gemini grows at ChatGPT's expense, not Google's

The key takeaway from the BofA report concerns who Gemini is actually cannibalizing. Analysts note that Gemini's fourfold year-over-year growth in web traffic and its 295 percent increase in daily mobile users come mainly at the expense of ChatGPT, not traditional Google search. In other words, users migrating to conversational AI assistants are increasingly choosing Google's own product over OpenAI's competitor, rather than abandoning search altogether.

Similarweb data also show that in the United States, Google Search traffic rose 3 percent year over year to 535 million visits, while ChatGPT in the US grew 19 percent to 31 million visits, with essentially no change globally. Google has also become the second-largest source of referral traffic from AI chatbots to external websites, overtaking Perplexity in that category.

Google's comments about an expansive moment for search point to the potential for continued strength - Justin Post, BofA Securities analyst

The investor calculus

BofA Securities maintained its buy rating on Alphabet stock, citing stable search traffic and solid e-commerce volumes in the second quarter as arguments for the potential to beat market expectations. The bank's analysts estimate earnings per share at $2.86, implying growth of around 24 percent year over year, with Alphabet due to report Q2 results on July 22, 2026.

That reverses the narrative that dominated just a year ago, when investors widely assumed generative AI search would quickly undercut the foundation of Google's advertising business. Instead, the company managed to build its own Gemini models directly into search, capturing some of the queries that might otherwise have gone to competitors, without a clear erosion of its main revenue source.

What this means for the Polish market

For Polish companies and marketers, this data is a meaningful signal against the popular belief that search optimization is losing ground to chatbot optimization. Google Search still accounts for the vast majority of referral traffic to websites, so SEO and search advertising remain the foundation of digital strategy, even as visibility in answers generated by Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude grows in importance alongside it.

Gemini's growing share of global generative AI traffic, now above 21 percent, also means companies investing in AI search visibility should treat Google's assistant as an increasingly important channel alongside OpenAI itself. For the advertising industry, the key question remains whether Google can sustain the pace of growth in search ad revenue as more answers are generated directly by AI instead of a classic list of links.

The ultimate test of this data will be Alphabet's second-quarter financial results, scheduled for July 22. That's when it will become clear whether rising search traffic actually translates into higher ad revenue, or whether Google is merely maintaining visit counts at the expense of margins as it pours ever more investment into the AI infrastructure needed to power generative answers.

Sources: This search engine won't be dethroned by chatbots. It's growing despite AI competition (cyfrowa.rp.pl), Google holds steady as Claude, Gemini surge in June user growth (finance.yahoo.com)