ChatGPT Surges Into Top 10 as Bing Plummets 50%, Reshaping U.S. Web Traffic Hierarchy
TLDR
Over the past year, ChatGPT surged to ninth among U.S. websites while Bing dropped 50%, revealing that AI adoption and policy changes are reshaping web traffic distribution far below the stable Google-YouTube dominance at the top.
Optimixed Overview
Optimixed's original report on this story.
Search Engine Land analyzed Semrush Traffic Analytics data from July 2026 versus July 2025 to map major U.S. website traffic shifts. Google and YouTube remain dominant—Google up 10.72% to 25.3 billion monthly visits and YouTube up 36.6% to 10.3 billion—yet the real story lies below: ChatGPT jumped 48.38% year-over-year to 1.09 billion visits and ninth place, surpassing DuckDuckGo and Bing. Bing suffered the steepest top-20 decline at 50.43% down despite Microsoft's three-year investment in Copilot integration, while other notable losers include Amazon (down 15.31%), DuckDuckGo (down 15.83%), and ESPN (down 16%). LinkedIn climbed into the top 20 for the first time, and the analysis flags a critical SEO blind spot: direct traffic in GA4 is rising sharply as AI chat interfaces strip referrer data, making attribution increasingly unreliable for measuring actual traffic sources.