• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

OpenAI’s ChatGPT enabled web search on 34.5% of queries as of February 2026 -- down from 46% in late 2024.

The time frame is significant because ChatGPT's training data has a cutoff, according to analysts at Semrush.

Semrush analysts examined more than 1 billion lines of U.S. clickstream data across mobile and desktop devices from October 2024 through February 2026 to learn how people interact with ChatGPT and how ChatGPT directs traffic across the web.

Adobe acquired Semrush, a software-as-a-service company, on November 19, 2025 for approximately $1.9 billion.

As of January 2026, the cutoff for training data was June 2024. This means results after that date are outside of what ChatGPT knows from training data alone, which makes it important for it to access live search data.

ChatGPT can access live data beyond its initial training through "Actions," which allow it to interact with external systems and APIs such as querying Bing for up-to-date information, and through plugins like WebPilot for internet browsing.

The cutoff is also important to keep in mind when determining how website visits that OpenAI ChatGPT can send to other websites affect referral traffic.

In this case, referral traffic grew in January 2026 compared with the year-ago month, although at least one plateau was identified during the year.

“The share of search-enabled sessions has been volatile throughout the study period — ranging from as low as 15% to as high as 66.3%,” according to a Semrush report published today.

OpenAI released numerous models and made updates to those models, according to model release notes, between October 2024 and February 2026.

This may change how aggressively ChatGPT reaches for live web data when referring traffic or answering a query, but data shows the number and share of search-enabled sessions declined every month from November 2025 through February 2026. 

Semrush cross-referenced the prompts in this dataset with the company’s database of more than 27 billion keywords to understand how much ChatGPT prompting resembles traditional search-engine queries, finding that for most it does not.

For example, “a traditional Google search could be 'best project management software,' while the ChatGPT equivalent could be 'I manage a 12-person remote engineering team and we're constantly missing deadlines. What should I change about our weekly standups'?"

These complex and specific queries do not exist in a traditional keyword database. This is a type of informational prompt, or what Semrush considered a new category such as
creating, analyzing, or ideating.

For most of the study period, between 65% and 85% of prompts could not be matched to any traditional search keyword in Semrush’s database.

People are asking more questions on average. On average, the number of queries per ChatGPT session ranged between 1.16 and 1.21 for most of 2025, rising 50% in the final four months of the study period to reach 1.75 by February 2026.

The top five most common prompts include “describe me based on all our chats,” “hola,” “hello,” “google,” and “write a text inviting my neighbors to a barbecue.”

Overall, ChatGPT continues to refer traffic from the large language model to ChatGPT, according to Semrush.

The company identified a 206% jump in year-over-year growth when comparing data from January 2025 to January 2026.

ChatGPT referred traffic to roughly 71,000 unique domains per month in October 2024, but that number peaked at around 260,000 in October 2025 -- around the time of ChatGPT's traffic plateau. By February 2026, the data showed it reached approximately 170,000. 

Seasonal activity could have made the data spike related to the holiday shopping period, according to Semrush. Or it could be the result of an intentional adjustment from OpenAI in terms of how ChatGPT cites domains. 

Date shows that websites that receive the most referral traffic from ChatGPT are within a few industries such as online services, computer software and development, and mass media. These cover a range of topics that ChatGPT's general-purpose user base tends to query.

Online services received the most referral traffic from ChatGPT, with more than 10 million points of referral traffic, and mass media received more than 5 million. Publishing, computer software, education, information technology, news, retail, government and finance followed in that order.

While Google is the main beneficiary of referral traffic, the traffic goes to just 10 domains.

Google alone accounts for 21.6% of all ChatGPT referral traffic. The next nine domains combined add another 8.6%, which brings the share of all referrals going to the top 10 to just more than 30% as of February 2026.