Bing Traffic To Our Clients' Sites Has Gone Up Since Microsoft Announced it Uses GPT

OpenAI and Microsoft have been making some huge announcements the past few months. Let's start with the timeline:

Timeline

November 30, 2022: OpenAI releases ChatGPT, its AI chatbot, which quickly becomes the "Fastest Growing App In The History Of Web Applications".

January 23, 2023: OpenAI and Microsoft announce an extended partnership, including a massive investment by Microsoft.

February 7:  Microsoft announces a new Bing that incorporates OpenAI's generative AI. They simultaneously create a bunch of incentives to drive adoption of the search engine. They put new users on a waitlist and offer to bump you up the line if you do things like make Edge your default browser and download the Bing app on your phone. See Tweet from Microsoft exec Yusuf Mehdi:

TODAY, March 15, 2023: OpenAI announces GPT-4, which is supposedly way better than the last generation.

Also today: Microsoft announces that Bing had actually been using GPT-4 already.

There are SO MANY implications of having widely available and high quality generative AI, but in this post I'm just going to address what they call "the search wars".

Are People Using Bing Search More?

Since Microsoft announced new Bing and created all these incentives to adopt their search engine, I've been wondering if people have been using it more. Even if not many people have gotten access to the new Bing yet, I thought usage might be up because of a) those incentives and b) all the press about Bing and the positive brand halo of being associated with innovation.

Since we're an organic search marketing agency, we've got some of our own client data to look at. The chart below shows four companies and the trends in organic traffic from Google and Bing. It shows a % change between the four weeks after the big Bing announcement on February 7 and the four weeks before the announcement.

As you can see, only one of the four sample companies (Client A) has seen a decline in Bing traffic since the announcement, and that is the company with the least overall traffic (meaning the least statistical significance).

The other three saw increases in Bing traffic ranging from 7% to 24%.

Now, these companies have seen an increase in organic search traffic overall (yay we're doing our job!), which creates the unsurprising positive correlation between Google % change and Bing % change.

But these three companies all saw a greater % increase from Bing than from Google.

Key Takeaway

Bing usage appears to be on the rise. These are results from only a four-week period and for only four websites, but the trend is clear.

SEO professionals have based their entire profession on analyzing Google performance, and now is the time for a shift. Marketers who pay attention to Bing performance will do a better job of capturing this search traffic as it grows. Furthermore, they will be better prepared to adapt to the fundamental changes coming to search as generate AI changes the entire user experience.

How are you adapting to the world of generative AI? How do you think search marketers' jobs will be different in 2-5 years?