AI search took half of Bing's traffic in a year. Google's went up 11%.

TL;DR: Someone counted how many times people visited the biggest websites in the United States in July 2026, and compared it with the same month a year ago. The story everyone expects — AI chatbots draining Google — is not what the numbers show. Google got about 11% more visits than a year ago. ChatGPT got 48% more and is now the ninth most-visited site in the country. The site that collapsed was Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which lost roughly half its traffic. So the people leaving ordinary search for AI answers are, so far, mostly leaving the second search engine, not the first. Meanwhile the AI side is splitting up: ChatGPT used to be almost the whole category and is now barely half of it.

What the numbers are, and what they are not

The figures come from Search Engine Land’s rundown of US web traffic, built on Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool, comparing July 2026 against July 2025.

One caveat up front, because it changes how much weight to put on any single line. Nobody outside these companies can see their real server logs. Tools like Semrush and Similarweb estimate traffic from panels — samples of real browsing behaviour — and then scale up. The direction and rough size of a change is usually trustworthy. The second decimal place is not. Treat “Bing fell about half” as the finding, not “Bing fell 50.43%”.

Here is what the estimate says for the US, July on July:

• Google: 25.3 billion monthly visits, up 10.72%
• YouTube: 10.3 billion, up 36.6%
• ChatGPT.com: 1.09 billion, up 48.38% — now ninth overall
• Bing: down 50.43%, the worst decline anywhere in the top 20
• DuckDuckGo: down 15.83%

Google grew. That is the part worth sitting with for a second, because most of the industry conversation for the past two years has assumed the opposite.

Why Bing and not Google

There is a plausible mechanical reason, and it isn’t that people stopped liking Bing.

A large share of what used to be a Bing search is now a Copilot conversation. Microsoft has been pushing Copilot into Windows, Office and Edge, so the query gets asked inside an app rather than by typing into bing.com. That query never registers as a website visit at all. Add ChatGPT taking the “I’ll just ask the AI” habit outright, and the middle ground — a second search engine you used occasionally — has very little left to do.

Google is protected from the same effect for an unglamorous reason: it is the default in the address bar of the browser most people use, and it now answers a large share of those queries with AI itself. The habit doesn’t have to move anywhere.

DuckDuckGo’s drop fits the pattern too. It was always the alternative to the alternative.

The AI side is fragmenting, fast

If you only track ChatGPT, you are measuring a shrinking slice.

Similarweb’s generative AI traffic figures cover June 2025 to May 2026, worldwide. The whole category grew about 70% year on year, to an average of 9.5 billion monthly visits. Inside that category, the shares moved hard:

• ChatGPT went from around 76% of gen-AI web traffic to about 53%
• Gemini went from under 9% to roughly 27–28%
• Claude went from about 2% to close to 9%

ChatGPT is still the biggest by a distance. But an agency that told a client in 2025 “we optimised for ChatGPT, that basically covers AI” was making a defensible simplification then. Repeating it now means ignoring nearly half the audience.

What to actually do with this

Three things follow, and none of them are dramatic.

First, keep doing technical SEO. Google is growing, it feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode from its own index, and the AI engines lean on conventional web infrastructure — a page that Google cannot crawl or parse is usually a page ChatGPT cannot cite either. Nothing here justifies moving budget away from crawlability, structured data and page quality.

Second, stop reporting “AI visibility” as one number. It is at least four or five separate audiences with different behaviour and different citation habits. A brand can be the standard recommendation in Gemini and completely absent from Perplexity.

Third — and this is the one that quietly wrecks reports — do not measure any of this through your analytics referral data. Google Analytics added a dedicated AI Assistant channel in May 2026, which was overdue and helpful. But as Search Engine Journal noted at the time, traffic that arrives without a referrer header — the small note a browser passes along saying where the click came from — still lands in Direct. Mobile apps strip it. In-app browsers strip it. Copy-pasted links never had it. So your AI Assistant number is a floor, not a total, and the gap between floor and total is not stable enough to model. We wrote about the same blind spot showing up in Search Console, which counts your appearances in AI answers but not the clicks.

The workable answer is to measure presence in the answers themselves: ask each engine the questions your customers ask, and record whether you come back.

Doing that by hand means running the same prompts on every engine, every week, for every client. That is the part worth handing to a machine.

Key takeaways

• US traffic estimates for July 2026 put Google up 10.72% year on year, ChatGPT.com up 48.38% and ninth overall, and Bing down 50.43% — the steepest fall in the top 20.
• AI answers are eating the second-tier search engines first. Bing queries are largely moving into Copilot inside Windows and Office, where they never appear as website visits.
• ChatGPT’s share of generative-AI web traffic fell from roughly 76% to about 53% between June 2025 and May 2026, while Gemini rose to around 27–28% and Claude to about 9%.
• Panel-based traffic estimates are directionally useful and precisely wrong. Read the size of the change, not the decimals.
• GA4’s AI Assistant channel undercounts: AI traffic arriving without a referrer header still lands in Direct, and mobile apps and copy-pasted links routinely strip it.
• Technical SEO keeps its value. Google grew, and its index still feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode.