Netflix started by mailing out other studios’ DVDs. Then it made its own shows. OpenAI is running roughly the same play on search.
The tell is in the experiment name. Research published by Peec AI found an OpenAI test called “prefer-index-over-serp-v3”, pitting its own index against third-party SERP results.
They also mapped separate indexes for news, shopping, PDFs, YouTube, and academic papers, plus a reported crawl experiment of up to a billion pages.
Meanwhile, the front door keeps getting busier. ChatGPT.com is now the ninth-biggest website in the US, up 48% year over year to 1.09 billion monthly visits.
Bing fell 50% over the same stretch. DuckDuckGo lost 16%.
But traffic to them is not traffic to you. 95% of ChatGPT users still use Google. They’re just clicking less.
Forcing users into AI Mode drops external click-through by 18.8 points. News links fall by 12.5. Reddit by 21.2.
The uncomfortable part is measurement. GA4 files most AI referrals under direct, with one publisher’s direct traffic now accounting for 78% of its total.
