Google Is No Longer the Only Front Door to Your Website

Between 2023 and 2025, the share of French people who name a search engine as their main way of getting information fell from 14% to 9%. The figure comes from the second edition of Les Français et l'information (opens in a new tab), a study run by Ipsos bva for Arcom, the French media regulator, among 3,377 people aged 15 and over between June and July 2025. Over the same interval, social networks rose from 9% to 15% as the main mode. Daily use of search engines, for its part, only slipped from 49% to 44%. The study warns that its history is not strictly comparable, since an item was added to the questionnaire. It measures how people follow the news rather than how they choose a provider. It remains the most solid French measurement of where a search begins.

The same year, Médiamétrie counted 39.7 million daily visitors (opens in a new tab) for the main search engines, up 3%. The two figures are compatible. People still go through Google, they start there less often. That is what fragmented discovery covers. Google is not being replaced by another engine. It is surrounded by entry points that did not exist or were not used for searching five years ago, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, Apple Maps, WhatsApp groups and AI assistants. The term search everywhere optimization was coined by Ashley Liddell of the British agency Deviation before being picked up by Rand Fishkin (opens in a new tab) in May 2025.

In September 2026, StatCounter credits Google with 88.16% of search in France (opens in a new tab) and 89.94% worldwide. The figure is often read as a share of searches. It measures something else. StatCounter explains in its FAQ (opens in a new tab) that its statistics rest on "search engine referrals", meaning the clicks that leave a results page for one of the sites fitted with its counter, "not the number of searches performed". A search that ends without a click does not exist in this measurement. Neither does a search made inside TikTok, Amazon or ChatGPT. The same FAQ notes that AI browsers identify themselves as Chrome and therefore remain invisible. The 88% share describes Google's dominance among the doors that send clicks to websites. It says nothing about the places where people search without leaving.

SparkToro and Datos, a Semrush subsidiary specialised in browsing data, published a measurement in March 2026 that counts differently. On a panel of several million desktop devices in the United States, they recorded the number of searches performed on 41 sites, classic engines, retail sites, social networks and AI tools together. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Google accounted for 73.7% (opens in a new tab) of those searches. Traditional engines concentrate about 80%, retail sites such as Amazon or Booking about 10%, social networks 5.5% and AI tools 3.2%. Amazon, Bing and YouTube each receive more searches than ChatGPT. The measurement covers desktop only, which underestimates TikTok and Instagram, whose use is mostly mobile. In Europe, Google weighs five points more than in the United States.

Google itself does not describe a decline. Sundar Pichai said in July 2026 (opens in a new tab) that AI Mode in Search had passed one billion monthly users and was "driving an incremental increase in Search queries overall". In May 2025, Eddy Cue, Apple's head of services, testified (opens in a new tab) at Google's antitrust trial that search volume in Safari had fallen the previous month for the first time in twenty-two years, because of ChatGPT and Perplexity in his view. Google replied the same day that total queries from Apple devices were increasing. Both statements can be true at once. Fragmentation concerns the starting point of the journey and not the volume of queries.

The Arcom study breaks down the main mode of information by age group. Among people under 25, 54% name social networks, video platforms or AI tools (opens in a new tab) as their main door. The share drops to 39% between 25 and 34, to 17% between 35 and 59 and to 4% after 59. For conversational AI tools alone, 68% of under-25s use them to get information, against 52% of 25 to 34 year olds, 41% of 35 to 59 year olds and 18% of people over 59. The gap between the youngest and oldest groups reaches fifty points on the main door.

The same slope appears in brand research. GWI, which surveys close to a million people a year across 54 markets, finds that 42% of Gen Z (opens in a new tab), born from 1997 onwards, mainly use a search engine to research a brand, against 63% of baby boomers, born before 1965. Across all ages, search engines remain the first source of new brand discovery, at 34%, ahead of TV advertising, word of mouth and social media advertising. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026, run by YouGov among 97,520 people in 48 markets, observes that 52% of 18 to 24 year olds (opens in a new tab) name social networks, video platforms or AI assistants as their main way of getting news.

The statements announcing that young people have abandoned Google deserve a careful reading. The most quoted comes from Prabhakar Raghavan, at the time head of Search at Google, who said in July 2022 (opens in a new tab) that "something like almost 40% of young people" look for a place to have lunch on TikTok or Instagram rather than on Google. Google clarified that this was an internal, unpublished survey of Americans aged 18 to 24. In France, the Future of Search study published by iProspect in February 2025 (opens in a new tab) indicates that 83% of French people still use Google regularly, that 24% of 16 to 24 year olds have reduced their use of Google against 12% of the population as a whole and that 47% of 18 to 24 year olds regularly use TikTok to find information. The method of this agency study is not published. Its orders of magnitude match Arcom's.

A firm whose clients are fifty still sees them arrive through Google, through referrals and through its business listing. A brand that addresses 25 to 34 year olds already has a share of customers who never start with a search engine. The map of entry points therefore reads first in the age pyramid of the customer base.

In 2025, 44% of French people talked with a conversational AI (opens in a new tab) during the month, 28.1 million people and 25 points more than in 2024, according to Médiamétrie. 11% do so every day. ChatGPT counted 24.4 million monthly visitors, far ahead of Gemini at 4 million and Perplexity at 2.2 million. Médiamétrie notes in the same review that search still represents close to six times the audience of these tools and four times the time spent. Among 15 to 24 year olds, the gap narrows to three to one.

The Reuters Institute measured in six countries including France (opens in a new tab) that the use of these tools for "getting information" rose from 11% to 24% between 2024 and 2025. Arcom for its part counts 37% of French people who use them to get information, 12% daily and 1% who make them their main mode.

What these tools send back to websites remains small. Similarweb counted in June 2025 (opens in a new tab) 1.13 billion visits sent by AI assistants to the world's top 1,000 websites, up 357% in a year, against 191 billion sent by Google Search in the same month. The ratio is below 1%. The growth is nonetheless real and the market is being redistributed. According to the same firm's 2026 landscape (opens in a new tab), generative AI platforms receive 9.5 billion visits a month, up 70%. ChatGPT's share of those visits fell from 76% in June 2025 to 53% in May 2026 to the benefit of Gemini and Claude.

One detail of that report bears directly on how a website is designed. Since a ChatGPT update in May 2026, which replaced footnotes with clickable brand names inside the answer, 58.8% of AI referral traffic lands on a homepage (opens in a new tab), while 65% of the URLs cited in answers sit two or three levels deeper in the site. The visitor has read a detailed answer drawn from a deep page of the site and arrives through the front door. The homepage receives a person who already has a precise question and the company's name.

The value of these visits varies by activity. Ahrefs, a maker of SEO tools, measured on its own site in June 2025 (opens in a new tab) that AI search accounted for 0.5% of its traffic and 12.1% of its signups. That is a single site, in B2B, meaning one that sells to businesses. For services, BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 Americans finds that 45% have used ChatGPT or a comparable tool (opens in a new tab) to get a local business recommendation, against 6% a year earlier, which makes it the third most used source of recommendations. Clio's 2025 report on the legal market indicates that more than half of consumers (opens in a new tab) have used or would consider using AI for a legal question and that 28% of those who did were directed to contact a lawyer.

France went through this shift without Google's AI. AI Overviews and AI Mode, the answers generated directly in the engine's results, were not deployed there because of the neighbouring rights granted to the press. Google wrote to publishers on 29 June 2026 to announce their arrival by 23 September 2026 at the latest (opens in a new tab), according to a letter revealed by Ouest-France. French fragmentation therefore happened through ChatGPT and TikTok before happening inside Google. What being cited by an AI actually brings a website is covered in the article on the traffic AI will not save (opens in a new tab).

Local businesses are where sources multiply fastest, according to American data. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, run online among 1,002 American adults and funded by a maker of local SEO software, finds that consumers consult an average of six different review sites (opens in a new tab). Google's share as a source of reviews fell from 83% in 2025 to 71%. The use of Apple Maps to read reviews nearly doubled, from 14% to 27%. The survey notes that most review readers then "fan out to websites" and other platforms "for reassurance". These figures are American and self-reported. No equivalent French survey exists at this scale.

Apple opened its Apple Business platform on 14 April 2026 (opens in a new tab) in more than 200 countries, bringing together the management of Apple Maps business listings, with ads at the top of search results announced for summer 2026 in the United States and Canada. An Apple Maps listing becomes a counter in the same way as the Google listing, with its own reviews and its own rules. The mechanics of the Google listing and the local pack are detailed in the article on local SEO for service businesses (opens in a new tab). What changes in 2026 is the number of counters. Each of them points back to the same website, the only place where the business controls the whole of the content.

Google Analytics 4, GA4 for short, the most widely used audience measurement tool, defines the Direct channel as visits that arrive "via a saved link or by entering your URL" (opens in a new tab). In practice, this channel receives every visit for which the browser transmitted no referrer, the address of the page the visitor came from. A link opened from WhatsApp, a text message or the Instagram app arrives without a referrer. So do some of the links clicked in ChatGPT. The agency Seer Interactive documents (opens in a new tab) that ChatGPT adds tracking parameters to some links only. Links without parameters or referrer "will likely appear as Direct".

Chartbeat, which measures the audience of a network of news sites, puts figures on this shift in its 2026 Publisher Playbook (opens in a new tab). Between July 2024 and July 2026, Google Search's share of the network's pageviews fell from 9% to 5%. Over the same period, direct traffic rose from 13.5% to 15.9% and dark social, which the report defines as links shared via texts, private messages and closed channels, from 7.1% to 11.3%. The network leans towards news sites, whose dependence on Google is particular. The mechanism applies to any site. The more discovery disperses into apps, the more the Direct column grows without anyone knowing what it contains.

Google added an AI Assistant channel to Google Analytics 4 on 13 May 2026 (opens in a new tab). Visits whose referrer matches a recognised assistant, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok or DeepSeek, receive the medium "ai-assistant" and are grouped in this channel. The official definition (opens in a new tab) specifies that it "excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode", which stay counted in organic search. The classification is not retroactive and only works when a referrer was transmitted. In Search Console, Google's tool for tracking a site's presence in the engine, clicks from generated answers are included in overall search traffic (opens in a new tab) without distinction. A site that appears in one of Google's AI answers cannot read it in its reports.

How each entry point appears in Google Analytics 4

UTM parameters, tags added to the end of an address to indicate its origin, are documented by Google (opens in a new tab). They only make readable the links the business publishes itself, on its listing, in its Instagram bio, in its messages or in its newsletter. Private sharing between two people stays in Direct and can be inferred from the growth of that channel.

A visitor who arrives through a door other than Google rarely arrives to discover. They arrive to check. Gartner surveyed 646 B2B buyers (opens in a new tab) between August and September 2025. 67% prefer a purchase journey without a sales representative and 45% used AI during a recent purchase. In a second survey (opens in a new tab) published in May 2026, 69% of buyers prefer to have a sales representative validate what an AI told them. The 28% of consumers directed to a lawyer by an AI in Clio's report describe the same visit, as do the review readers who, at BrightLocal, "fan out to websites for reassurance". The person arrives with a name, a claim heard elsewhere and sometimes a price. The website serves to confirm them.

This visit asks two things of the website that the visit from Google did not ask to the same degree. The first concerns the homepage, which now receives the majority of arrivals from AI assistants. It has to restate in a few lines the answer the visitor read elsewhere, whether the offer, the area served, the price or the method. It then has to lead to the proof. The second concerns the proof itself. Reviews, case studies, the team, prices and terms are the pages that confirm or contradict what TikTok, Reddit or ChatGPT said. A website that buries or omits them sends the visitor back to the platform they came from, which offers some without it.

The name typed into Google after a video or an AI answer becomes a brand query, the only kind of query whose clicks are growing, as the article on brand demand (opens in a new tab) shows. When an agent rather than a person comes to confirm, the page has to be machine-readable, which the article on the visitor who will not be human (opens in a new tab) details. In both cases, the business controls neither the door's algorithm nor its lifespan, whereas it controls the website. Even Reddit, the platform Google favoured most in 2024 and 2025, reported in its shareholder letter (opens in a new tab) for the second quarter of 2026 that search referrals had been "choppy" and was betting on its own search tools. A service business does not have the means to build its own door. It has a website that every other door leads to.

Google keeps 88% of search clicks in France and its daily audience is growing. At the same time, the share of French people who start with a search engine has fallen five points in two years, more than half of under-25s start elsewhere and AI assistants reach 44% of the population every month while sending back less than 1% of clicks. A company's map of entry points reads in the age of its customers and in its sector, more than in global market shares.

For a small business or an independent professional, three consequences follow. Measurement gets repaired before it gets read, by tagging the links the business publishes and by following the AI Assistant channel and Direct traffic together. Presence concentrates on the two or three doors the actual customer base uses, identified by its age and sector, rather than on all of them. The website, finally, is designed for the confirmation visit, with a homepage that restates the answer and proof reachable in one click. Doors multiply and their rules change without notice. The website remains the place they all lead to and the only one the business owns.