By For the past year, SparkToro’s had the remarkable ability to tell you how much your audience used Google vs. ChatGPT, Perplexity vs. Yahoo, Claude vs. Bing, and dozens of other search engines and AI tools. But… well, we’re a bit embarassed to say this… that data used clickstream visitation, NOT search and prompting activity.
When we conducted our research last week, Search Happens Everywhere, we realized this fundamental error, and Casey made a quick change to our system to use this more accurate, more useful, more relevant data.
This is now live for everyone in SparkToro (free users and paid subscribers alike), and your Search & AI Tools graph now shows the percent of your audience who searches/prompts on Yahoo, ChatGPT, Deepseek, Google, and dozens of others.
Because, as you can see from the graph below (via that research project with Datos), while 97% of visitors to Google search, only 56% of visitors to ChatGPT and 35% of visitors to Yahoo do. That’s a massive delta!
What’s going on? Well, if you’re reading SparkToro, you’ve probably done some AI prompting yourself, and when you did, likely sent the output to a colleague, friend, or family member at least once or twice. Those shared prompt/response URLs are the only way a lot of people experience ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools. They don’t prompt anything themselves, they just look at what others have shared.
For Yahoo, and other classic search engines with content sites attached and other ways of browsing beyond the search bar (Archive.org, Baidu, Pinterest, etc.), search usage isn’t the primary or biggest reason people visit. Yahoo offers weather, sports, finance numbers, and plenty of juicy celebrity gossip news. Search is only used by ~1/3rd of visitors.
And thankfully, your SparkToro data now represents this reality accurately. If you still want to see visitation, just go to the “All Websites” subcategory page under the “Websites” link in your report.