🔍 THE SEARCH WARS: 2025 YEAR IN REVIEW (AND WHAT'S COMING IN 2026)
Remember early 2024 when everyone said ChatGPT was going to kill Google? The narrative was set: traditional search was dying, AI chatbots would take over, and we were witnessing the end of an era. Now, as we look to close out 2025, the reality is way more interesting than anyone predicted. Here's what actually happened this year, what's coming in 2026, and why it matters more for your business than you probably realize. The battle that defined 2025: Google didn't just fight back. It went on offense. After its market share dipped below 90% for the first time since 2015 in late 2024, something fascinating happened: Google stabilized and started gaining ground again. By late 2025, Google had clawed back to around 90.7% market share. Meanwhile, AI-native tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude that were surging throughout early 2025 actually lost share for the first time ever in the second half of the year. But here's the twist: that doesn't mean AI lost. It means the battlefield shifted. What actually changed in 2025: Google transformed itself into an AI company. AI Overviews now appear in over 50% of all searches (and in some categories like Science and Health, they're showing up in 60%+ of results). Google's AI Mode launched globally, offering an end-to-end AI search experience that competes directly with ChatGPT. The impact was dramatic. Click-through rates dropped 61% for organic results and 68% for paid ads when AI Overviews appeared. Zero-click searches jumped from 56% to 69%. Publishers that relied on Google traffic got hammered, with some seeing declines of 34-89% depending on their content category. Educational sites like Chegg reported a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic and sued Google over it. The entire publisher ecosystem went into crisis mode. The numbers that tell the real story: ChatGPT went from 0.25% search market share in early 2024 to somewhere between 2.1% and 4.33% by the end of 2025, depending on how you measure it. That's a 740-840% increase in just 18 months.