ChatGPT reaches a fifth of Google search volume

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This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Thursday, November 5, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice. Today, OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles a fifth of Google's search volume. Taboola blames AI summaries as its revenue falls, and heads to mediation with Yahoo. Anthropic signs its first news licensing deal, and Amazon lets advertisers find people who shop at Walmart. We start with a podcast. On Wednesday, November 4, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Adam Fry of OpenAI told the interviewer, Alex Kantrowitz, that ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth of Google's. Fry counts a search as anytime someone asks a question and ChatGPT searches the web, which covers lookups for people, places, things, finance, and health. He said ChatGPT grew from 1 billion to 1.2 billion users over the past two months, adding roughly 100 million users in one month and another 100 in the next. Glenn Gabe added that Voice reaches 250 million weekly users and remarked that ChatGPT is now bigger than Bing.

Barry Schwartz pointed out that Google says its own search volume is at an all-time high, so a fifth of a growing number isn't by itself proof that Google is shrinking. The figure is a definition as much as a measurement. OpenAI counts questions nobody would have typed into a search box a few years ago. But for advertisers, the comparison is the one that matters. A fifth of Google's query volume is an audience large enough to justify its own budget line and ChatGPT now carries ads. The agents doing the searching are multiplying too. Microsoft Clarity added an Agent Activity Dashboard that shows which AI agents visit a site and what they do, from searches to checkout. Simulation tests check whether an agent can complete a task, how long it took, and how many steps it needed. Microsoft said AI agents nearly doubled in three weeks to almost 2 million. Now to the news business. Adweek reported that Anthropic has struck its first licensing deal with a digital news publisher, the Associated Press, for election coverage. A cloud user asking about polling on election night got up to the minute information credited to the AP.

Neither side disclosed terms. OpenAI has already signed more than a dozen such deals with publishers including Axel Springer, News Corp, and The Atlantic. Election night was a natural first case. Results change by the minute, and no chat bot can guess them from its training data.

The companies that distribute the open web reported the other side of that shift. PPC Land reported that Taboola's third quarter revenue fell 6.9 percent to $462.3 million, and it lowered its full year outlook, even as gross profit and adjusted earnings rose. The bigger news sits in its quarterly filing. After September 30, Taboola and Yahoo each filed a notice of mediation, each claiming the other wasn't meeting its obligations under their 30-year native advertising deal. Yahoo supplied $68.2 million of revenue in the quarter, about 15 percent of the total.

Neither company said what's in dispute. Management blamed fewer ad impressions and pointed to AI summaries and large language models. Chief executive Adam Singhalda said the environment is changing, as people shift how they discover content across the open web. Taboola sells ads under articles, and when readers get their answer without reaching the article, there's less to sell.

The New York Times did better, though not as well as it promised. Digital ad revenue rose 12 percent to $109.9 million in the third quarter, short of the mid to high teens growth the company forecast in August. Total revenue rose 9.7 percent to $768.5 million, and the Times added about 420,000 digital-only subscribers, taking the total to 13.76 million. It ended the quarter with $1.26 billion in cash and no debt. Criteo used its quarter to argue it's more than a retail media company. It plans to take its shopper data, TV ads, to Brazil and Mexico by the end of 2026, and to Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Australia in 2027

But revenue fell 11 percent to $416 million, and ad exchanges James Hercher noted that profit shrank from $40 million a year earlier to $6 million.

One bright spot is ChatGPT.

Criteo was in seven countries with ChatGPT a few months ago, and it's now in 89

Chief Executive Michael Komoczynski called it the company's fastest growing partnership and channel, though Criteo gave no revenue figure.

Retail data is crossing store lines. Adweek reported that Amazon advertisers can now reach people who also shop at Walmart, Dollar General, Kroger, Walgreens, or Sephora through a tie-up between the data firm Attain and Amazon's buying tool. The ads run across Amazon's inventory, including Prime Video. Pricing wasn't disclosed. TikTok Shop is getting sellers ready for Black Friday on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30 A new guide groups its seller tools under the name Seller AI, and one agent estimates how many extra orders each listing fix will bling, without saying how.