Google Is Winning AI. That's Actually Good News.
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
A year ago, the narrative was simple: OpenAI had built the future, and everyone else was playing catch-up. Google, the undisputed king of search, was somehow the underdog—fumbling chatbot launches, getting mocked for factual errors, ridiculed by the industry and the public alike. When you are beaten in the mindshare game by something called “Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”, you clearly messed up the product.
That story is over.
Gemini’s market share has nearly quadrupled, from 5.7% to over 21% in just twelve months. ChatGPT dropped from 87% to around 65%. It’s still the leader, but the near-monopoly is gone. More interesting for us: referral traffic from Gemini to external websites grew 388% year-over-year, compared to 52% for ChatGPT. People aren’t just chatting with Gemini—they’re clicking through.
The real story isn’t about market share but about integration. ChatGPT is an app you open. Gemini is embedded in what you already use: Android itself, Gmail, Docs, Maps, and most importantly, Search. Google didn’t build a better chatbot (it did not); it wired AI into the infrastructure of your digital life. When you control the operating system, you don’t need to win users—you inherit them.
For us marketers, this competitive shift is actually a relief.
OpenAI remains a black box. We don’t know how its recommendations work. We can’t optimize for visibility. And while they’re reportedly building an ads platform, developing something advertisers can actually trust—with proper targeting, measurement, and governance—takes years, not months.
Google, for all its opacity, is a known quantity. We’ve been living inside its ecosystem for a decade. The rules change constantly, but at least we know where the game is being played.
AI Overviews, AI Mode, sponsored placements—these aren’t mysterious new frontiers. They’re extensions of systems we already understand.
The practical takeaway: keep doing what works. Optimize for search visibility and semantic richness, because Google’s AI pulls from the same index. Make sure your product narratives are clear enough for a conversational model to summarize. And watch AI Overviews like a hawk—they’re already appearing in 60% of searches.
The future of AI discovery may be uncertain, but for now, it looks a lot like the past. And that’s not a bad thing.
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