Worldwide, in Europe, in Switzerland: how differently the search is already happening before it even reaches Google

Three times the same question, three different answers

Someone is looking for a holiday flat for the upcoming autumn holidays. In the past, they would have opened a search engine for this. Today, they might instead type the question into an AI chat - and receive a ready-made answer rather than a list of links. How often this happens varies considerably by region. This is not an academic question: if you don't know how far this shift has already progressed in your market, you also can't judge how urgent it is becoming for you to be visible in AI answers.

Worldwide: Google remains the majority, but it's no longer a given

Global figures depend heavily on exactly what is being counted. If you rely only on classic search engines, Google remains practically unchallenged with a market share of around 90%, as Statcounter data from January 2026 shows. If, however, you add up all digital queries, whether they go to a search engine or an AI chat, the picture shifts: an analysis by First Page Sage for the third quarter of 2026 puts classic Google search at around 56% and ChatGPT at around 19%, with the remainder going to other search engines and AI services such as Bing or Gemini. Both figures are correct at the same time, because they measure different populations - a reminder of how carefully individual percentages on this topic should be treated. Market researchers at Gartner estimate that by the end of 2026, around a quarter of organic search traffic could migrate to AI assistants and chatbots - a forecast, not a measured figure.

Europe: generative AI has arrived in everyday life, search is only part of it

For Europe, there is as yet no figure that specifically measures the share of search queries going to AI chats. However, the European Commission does survey the general use of generative AI tools as part of the Eurobarometer. In the "Special Eurobarometer Digital Decade 2026", surveyed between February and March 2026, more than half of EU citizens use generative AI tools: 59% in their private lives, 49% at work or in education and training. This is a broader metric than "search instead of search engine", but it shows that the basis for a shift in search already exists across Europe as well.

Switzerland: almost every second chat user is already searching without Google

For Switzerland, there is a figure that comes closer to the question at hand. According to a representative Comparis survey from March 2026, 76.1% of the adult Swiss population now use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Perplexity - up from just 49.7% in 2024 and 62.4% in 2025. And among those who are already familiar with chatbots, 41.6% already use them instead of a classic search query with Google or Bing; in 2024, this figure was still 27.2%. The survey also shows a divide within the country: usage is more widespread in French-speaking Switzerland (Romandie) than in German-speaking Switzerland.

What these differences mean for your visibility

The three figures cannot simply be placed side by side, because they measure different things - global queries, general AI use in Europe, search substitution in Switzerland. What they have in common is the direction of travel: the share of queries bypassing search engines is growing everywhere, most visibly in Switzerland itself. For you as a host, this doesn't mean you need to abandon your existing online presence. However, it is worth checking, when you get the chance, whether the description of your accommodation remains understandable even when it isn't read as a webpage but summarised by an AI chat: clear facts about location, amenities and house rules, rather than just impressions. This helps regardless of which channel ultimately brings a guest to you.