Short answer
Not on the evidence so far. OpenAI said ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly users in February 2026, yet Google still handles far more searches and has added AI answers of its own. The likelier picture for 2027 is several engines used side by side, so the practical goal for a site owner is to be findable in all of them, not to pick a winner.
Is ChatGPT replacing Google right now?
No measure available in late 2026 shows that. ChatGPT is very large: OpenAI said it passed 900 million weekly users in February 2026. But weekly users of one app and searches on Google are counted differently, so no single number says who is ahead. What the data does show is growth in AI use, not the disappearance of search.
Google is also not standing still. It has put AI Overviews and AI Mode inside Search, so many people already get AI answers without leaving Google. In India, Google launched AI Mode in June 2025 and has since added Hindi and several other Indian languages.
What do the Similarweb figures show, and what do they not?
You will see “AI traffic share” used for three different things. Mixing them up is a common mistake in this debate, so here they are apart.
- Share among AI platforms. Similarweb's 2026 reports put ChatGPT at roughly 53 to 56% of generative-AI website traffic, down from about 72% earlier, with Gemini at about a quarter and Claude near 9.6%. This says ChatGPT's lead over other AI tools is shrinking. It says nothing about Google.
- Share of referrals. How many visits to ordinary websites come from AI assistants. This is the number that matters for your traffic, and it is a different measure from the one above.
- Chatbot market share. Who has the most users. It can rise or fall without changing the other two.
One more Similarweb finding helps site owners: the share of ChatGPT answers that cite a web source rose more than fivefold in a year, to 6.8%. That is fast growth from a low base, so most ChatGPT answers still cite no web source.
Does AI add to Google use, or replace it?
So far it looks mostly like an addition. Reports based on Similarweb traffic data in 2026 have generally found that Google remains far ahead in visits and that people who try AI assistants keep using Google too. Treat that as directional, because studies of overlap use different methods and panels.
What has changed inside Google is the click. SparkToro data from early 2026 found about 68% of US Google searches ended without a click, against 49% in 2019, and zero-click searches have their own answer. Google AI Mode pushes in the same direction.
What is the likely picture in 2027?
This is an expectation, mostly from vendors, so read it as directional. The common forecast is that traditional search stays the largest channel in 2027, while AI assistants become a smaller but growing share of referrals, with several engines in use at once and agents doing more tasks for people. Gartner's 2024 forecast of a 25% fall in traditional search volume by 2026 was widely quoted, but it should not be treated as having happened.
What does this mean for a site owner?
Be findable everywhere rather than betting on one engine. The same pages serve every channel: Ahrefs' study of 1.9 million AI Overview citations found about 76% of cited pages ranked in Google's top ten, so ranking well and being cited are linked.
- Keep pages crawlable, fast and useful. That is the base for Google and for AI.
- Allow the AI crawlers you want in robots.txt, and check your host's bot protection is not turning them away.
- Add original facts and cited sources, which the 2024 Princeton and IIT Delhi GEO paper linked to higher visibility in generative answers.
- Ask the assistants your customers' questions every month and note whether they mention you. Arcline does this on Premium by storing the answers it gets; see Features.
For ChatGPT specifically, how to show up in ChatGPT answers covers what is known and what is not.