What ChatGPT's Traffic Drop Means for Marketers

You may have seen news recently that traffic to chat GPT is actually dropping and that this has caused open AAI to announce a code red. This is because other rival AI tools like Google Gemini and Anthropics Claude are starting to eat away at market share. Now, if you're a marketer, you might think this doesn't really have anything to do with you. After all, isn't this just tech bros fighting over who can lose the most billions in a FOMO induced capex fight to the death? Well, yes, it is. But it does actually have really profound implication for marketers and I've got some data to prove it. But first, what's going on and does this really matter? Well, here's the data that Open AI is so worried about. This is the monthly app downloads and you can see that ChatGpt has had a pretty dominant position for most of 2025, but Gemini is really catching up. There's also this data which shows how Google's Gemini is closing the gap against OpenAI for website visits. and this data that shows that when people do visit Google Gemini's site, they stay for longer than they do on ChatGpt. This has panicked Open AI and they've reportedly decided to delay rolling out ads into ChatGpt. Now, here at Exposure Ninja, we don't really care about who wins the AI race so long as the AI tools are recommending your products and your services so that you're generating more customers from them. But that's where things get a bit interesting. We use tools like Semrush to see how these AI tools are mentioning different brands so that we can reverse engineer what to do them to mention those brands more often. And at Exposure Ninja, we talk about AI search optimization, basically getting people to buy from you after having your products and services recommended to them by AI tools a lot. We do this for clients and we win lots of awards. In fact, this week we won another three to add to the five that we won about a month ago. But most brands have a different level of visibility on chat GPT than they do on Google's products like Gemini and AI mode. Here's an example. We're looking at callrail.com which is a call tracking business. Now their visibility on chat GBT is 55 out of 100, which means that they are being mentioned and recommended about 55% of the time for the prompts that they are relevant for. If we compare this to Google's AI mode which uses Gemini that drops to 46%. And the core reason for this difference is why these code red announcements and who is winning the AI race [music] actually has a material impact on marketers strategies or should do. Let me show you why. When you ask an AI tool like here I'm asking Gemini how could I track phone calls coming into my business? I want to know where people are finding us. Gemini gives me a really detailed answer and it even recommends some different software tools that I could try. Call Rail being the top one. Now to make this recommendation, it uses sources. It goes and does some background web search, finds different websites on the internet and takes information from those websites to display in the answer. So of course, if you want your business to be seen in this answer, you need to do two things. Firstly, you want your website to be cited as one of the sources as Call Rails is here. But secondly, when a third-party website is being cited as a source, you want your brand to be mentioned wherever possible. Now, if it's a competitor site, like in this case, Nimbata, that might not be possible. But if it's a third-party review site, for example, you want to make sure your brand is featured and featured prominently on that page. If you do both of those things, both having your website cited and third-party websites that mention you, then you've got a really good chance of not only being mentioned, but actually being recommended in these answers. This is the future of digital marketing. This is the game that all brands will eventually be playing and deploying vast amounts of marketing energy into. But you already knew that cuz you're watching this video. So, what does this have to do with whether Gemini is beating Chat GBT? Well, that all comes down to choosing which websites to be seen on. Now the AI rank tracking tools like this one from Semrush show sources as part of their data. So they will show you which are the top websites that are being cited as sources in the AI answers. So here we are looking at the most common websites cited by chat GPT that mention call rail. And if we want we can drill down and have a look at the specific prompts that have triggered those mentions. But we're not going to do that right now. Right now, I want you to just look at the types of websites that are being cited. We've got some userenerated content sites like Reddit, possibly Wikipedia you put in that category, LinkedIn. We've got some reviews type sites like Tech Radar, which is like an industry publication, G2, which is a reviews site. We've got competitors and other websites in the space like Zappia, Nimbata, Call Atlas, but really the vast majority of mentions on chat GBT are coming in this case from Reddit and Wikipedia. But if we switch over to having a look at the websites being cited by AI mode, which remember uses Gemini, we get a very different picture. Reddit is barely cited. Wikipedia doesn't appear in the top 30 cited websites. And we've got Google owned properties like YouTube and Google, which are cited much more frequently on Google's tools, surprise, surprise, than they are by ChatGpt. If you spend a lot of time like me looking at screens like this, you'll start to notice some patterns. Namely, Google loves itself and chat GPT loves consensus. Let me show you. Now, what I did here is compile a spreadsheet. And this spreadsheet categorizes the top cited websites by the number of mentions that they provided across [music] chat GBT and Gemini. And this is just for call rail, but it illustrates exactly this pattern that we're talking about. Reddit, the absolute dominant source on chat GBT. For Google, barely even there. Wikipedia, the second most common source for Chat GBT. For Google, not even in the top 30. So, what is Google pulling from? Well, it's pulling from competitors and vendors. Now, these numbers might look the same, but bear in mind that Google is only pulling 464 mentions from the top 30 results, whereas Chat GPT is pulling 793. So although these numbers look fairly similar, but as a percentage, Google tends to trust competitors and vendors and own brand websites way more. YouTube and Google are also a major source for Gemini, not so much for Chat GPT. Chat GPT prefers news and directories and news and media sites more, whereas Gemini will tend to dig deeper into the search results to find those niche blogs. Okay, Tim, who cares? Well, this demonstrates that AI search optimization actually has different tracks for different platforms. If we go back to the old traditional world of SEO, we all just tracked our ranking on Google because Google was so dominant, we didn't even have to think about Bing. I don't know anyone who tracked their ranking consistently on Bing because it just didn't matter. All we needed to focus on was Google. But with AI search optimization, this is not the case. You need to be aware of the different AI search platforms, who's winning and losing, and importantly, which platforms are preferred by your customers because there are demographic differences between usage in different platforms. Look, the difference between Gemini in black and chat GPT and orange for females and males shows that there is a clear trend towards one or the other. And this explains why you can be doing really well on one platform, but you can be almost invisible on another platform. If you're not being seen in the types of websites that that platform sites as sources, you might have much lower visibility than elsewhere where you're being seen loads and talked about on Reddit, for example. But this also means that market shifts in who's winning the AI wars might have a material impact on your business's lead generation and sales from AI tools. If all of this feels a bit much and you just want someone to give you the answer for your business, then good news. The team at Exposure Ninja can do exactly that. We have something called the free digital marketing review. In this review, we'll analyze your visibility across all of the different platforms and we'll map you out a prioritized bespoke action plan that you can follow to increase your visibility on AI, also on traditional search. We'll even analyze your paid search visibility and your website's conversion rate optimization. We'll take all of our analysis and research and compile it into a video which we'll record to you completely free of charge showing you what to do over the next 12 months to significantly increase your visibility. And by the way, this is amazing. Some of the world's largest brands have requested this review and the feedback that they give us is incredible. But not everybody is eligible. So you do need to apply for this and to do that head over to exposurinja.com/re. Of course, the most important question of all is who is going to win the AI race? Let us know in the comments.