The End of the Search Party: Platforms and LLMs Take Over

Both OpenAI and Anthropic released reports this week examining user engagement with their respective chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude, highlighting the rapid and sustained growth of Large Language Models (LLMs).
There has been growing concern that LLMs could erode the market share of traditional search engines such as Google. Occam longitudinally tracks a variety of LLM use cases. One key area of focus is how Americans search for general knowledge. Over the past year, LLMs have experienced significant adoption in this domain at the expense of more traditional platforms, including blogs, Wikipedia, books, and search engines. However, the implications for Alphabet (Google’s parent company) remain unclear, given strong growth from YouTube and the growth of Gemini, Alphabet’s own LLM, in its ecosystem. Occam also highlights a noticeable shift toward direct search on social platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and X.
In addition, Occam maintains detailed demographic tracking of LLM users and analyzes other prominent use cases (data available upon request). Subscribe today to stay ahead of the curve.

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