ChatGPT Search Term on Google Trends
😎
🤖 Screen capture of a Google Trends page showing the search term “chatgpt” over the past five years. The graph displays interest over time, with a noticeable spike starting around late 2022 and continuing upward through early 2024. The interface is set to display global data from “Web Search” across all categories. The screen includes standard Google Trends features like the “Explore” and “Trending Now” tabs at the top, with options to compare data or download results. At the bottom right, a Reddit logo is visible, indicating the image is shared from the ChatGPT community on Reddit.
[Alt text by ALT Text Artist GPT]
😎
🤖 Screen capture of Google Trends showing search data for the term “Openai” over the past five years worldwide. The graph shows a sharp spike in interest starting in early 2023, followed by fluctuations but remaining significantly higher than prior years. The interface includes options to compare terms, share the data, and filter by various parameters. The URL “trends.google.com” is visible at the top of the screen.
[Alt text by ALT Text Artist GPT]
Further context (posted on LinkedIn)
What’s behind ChatGPT’s recent spike in Google Trends ‘interest’? This question was posted on Reddit, and I thought it would be relevant to share my point of view, especially for those who downplay the importance of SEO in the era of massive social media platforms governed by algorithms and, paradoxically, large language models.
For sure back to school/work is an important driver most people point at, but here’s my hunch on a very likely factor affecting Google queries even more: the ChatGPT URL recently changed from chat.openai.com to chatgpt.com (Google query). It is a known fact that a great amount of Google searches, especially for the most popular terms, are ‘unconscious’ or ‘accidental’ queries that users simply type on the address bar without caring to enter the ‘https’ at the beginning (this is defaulted by most web browsers anyway) and, more importantly, the “.com” at the end, which sometimes may autocomplete, sometimes not… It’s easy to infer many people (myself included) have just increasingly gotten used to typing ‘ChatGPT’ in the web browser rather than ‘OpenAI’, which often results in the user being directed to their default search engine (typically Google) before clicking on the actual link they would have landed on directly if only typed “.com” at the end. Indeed, I noticed (and more people did) that the domain change was handled in an extremely awkward way by OpenAI, forcing users to edit their bookmarks, as the old chat.openai.com suddenly stopped redirecting to the ChatGPT login page. This for sure has a huge impact on search engine statistics and ranking. Here are the Google Trends queries…
Hugging Face Dataset Metrics
All the conversation prompts, responses, and metrics are available to download and explore on Hugging Face dataset reddgr/talking-to-chatbots-chats: