Google’s Walled Garden: Users Make 10 Clicks Before Leaving via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern
A study analyzing Google vs ChatGPT traffic finds Google keeps users on its site longer, but sends the most traffic overall. The post Google’s Walled Garden: Users Make 10 Clicks Before Leaving appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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A study analyzing Google vs ChatGPT traffic finds Google keeps users on its site longer, but sends the most traffic overall.
Data suggests that Google keeps users on its site longer by expanding its in-platform features. ChatGPT drives 2.3 times more visits per user to external sites. Google drives more traffic overall.New data shows Google keeps users on its site longer. Visitors now make 10 clicks on Google’s site before leaving for another website.
This finding comes from a 13-month study comparing Google and ChatGPT traffic patterns.
Google Keeps Users In, ChatGPT Sends Them Out
Tyler Einberger of Momentic analyzed Similarweb data showing that Google’s “pages per visit” metric has climbed to 10 as of March, a big jump from before.
Image Credit: Momentic.
What does this mean? Users spend more clicks on Google’s search results than on other websites.
The report explains:
“Increasing ‘Pages per Visit’ for Google.com is an indicator that users are spending more clicks within Google’s search results (SERPs). Since most SERP interactions—like interacting with SERP features, paging, refining searches, or clicking images—change the URL but keep visitors on Google’s domain.”
Google still sends the most overall traffic to external websites.
Google generated 175.5 million outgoing visits in March compared to ChatGPT’s 57.6 million. This represents a 66.4% increase for Google compared to last year.
The Efficiency Gap
ChatGPT is more efficient at sending people to other websites.
The numbers tell the story:
ChatGPT generates 1.4 external website visits per user Google produces just 0.6 visits per userThis means ChatGPT users are 2.3 times more likely to visit external websites than Google users, even though Google’s audience is about 6.8 times larger.
The SERP Retention Strategy
Google’s increasing in-platform clicks match its strategy of expanding search features. These features provide immediate answers without requiring users to visit other websites.
Google is succeeding at two goals:
Remaining the web’s primary traffic source Keeping users on Google’s properties longerWhile Google sent more outgoing traffic in early 2025, its audience barely grew. This shows a complex relationship between keeping users and referring them elsewhere.
What This Means
For SEO pros and marketers, this trend creates new challenges and opportunities:
With users spending more time on Google’s interfaces, capturing attention in the first screen view matters more than ever. Focus on appearing in featured snippets, knowledge panels, and other SERP elements to maintain visibility as traditional organic clicks become harder to get. Consider ChatGPT and other AI platforms as additional traffic sources since they refer more visitors per user. Users now interact with multiple SERP features before clicking a website, requiring better attribution models and content strategies.The Broader AI Search Market
While Google and ChatGPT lead the conversation, other AI search platforms are growing fast.
Perplexity grew 110.7% month-over-month in March. Grok grew 48.1% and Claude grew 23%.
These newer platforms could change current traffic patterns as they gain users, though the report doesn’t analyze their referral efficiency in detail.
Google remains the biggest traffic source overall. However, its growing “walled garden” approach means marketers should watch these trends and diversify where their traffic comes from.
Featured Image: Here Now/Shutterstock
SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal
Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, ...
