New information reveals Google retains customers on its web site longer. Guests now make 10 clicks on Google’s web site earlier than leaving for one more web site.
This discovering comes from a 13-month research evaluating Google and ChatGPT site 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.
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 hold guests on Google’s area.”
Google nonetheless sends essentially the most general site 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 12 months.
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 occasions extra more likely to go to exterior web sites than Google customers, though Google’s viewers is about 6.8 occasions bigger.
The SERP Retention Technique
Google’s rising in-platform clicks match its technique of increasing search options. These options present rapid solutions with out requiring customers to go to different web sites.
Google is succeeding at two targets:
- Remaining the net’s major site visitors supply
- Protecting customers on Google’s properties longer
Whereas Google despatched extra outgoing site visitors in early 2025, its viewers barely grew. This reveals a fancy relationship between maintaining customers and referring them elsewhere.
What This Means
For website positioning professionals and entrepreneurs, this pattern 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.
- Give attention to showing in featured snippets, information panels, and different SERP parts to take care of visibility as conventional natural clicks change into more durable to get.
- Take into account ChatGPT and different AI platforms as extra site 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 site visitors patterns as they acquire customers, although the report doesn’t analyze their referral effectivity intimately.
Google stays the largest site visitors supply general. Nevertheless, its rising “walled backyard” strategy means entrepreneurs ought to watch these traits and diversify the place their site visitors comes from.
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