The news: AI competition is tightening as consumer behavior changes in ways that are significant for all brands.
- OpenAI faces rising pressure from Google’s Gemini 3 because of its improved performance and multimodal functionality in text, sound, vision, video, and coding tasks.
- Meanwhile, new data shows that ChatGPT drives far less traffic to publishers than expected because consumers aren’t clicking on AI links.
Zooming in: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned staff to expect “rough vibes” as Google’s Gemini 3 Pro showed real gains in pretraining and automated task execution—areas OpenAI has struggled to scale reliably, per The Information.
“By all accounts, Google has been doing excellent work recently,” Altman told colleagues in a memo. He said Google’s AI efforts could “create some temporary economic headwinds for our company.”
The rise of Gemini 3 Pro:
- On LMArena’s leaderboard, Gemini 3 Pro achieved the top spot above all competing models in coding, mathematics, creative writing, and visual comprehension while operating at one-tenth the cost per task of ChatGPT, per The Verge.
- On Humanity’s Last Exam—an academic reasoning test—Gemini 3 Pro scored 37.5%, while GPT-5.1 reached 26.5% and Claude Sonnet 4.5 hit 13.7%, per Fast Company.
Gemini’s momentum narrows the distance between players. Its improved accuracy, multimodal interface, and lower cost might lead brands to reconsider future AI toolkits as they adjust budgets for the coming year.
Publisher challenges: Data leaked from OpenAI to Vincent Terrasi, CTO and co-founder of Draft & Goal, revealed ChatGPT may surface publisher links, but users rarely click them, per MarTech.
One top-ranked page generated 610,775 impressions and only 4,238 clicks—a 0.69% clickthrough rate (CTR)—which is very low, especially for a top-ranked page with over 600,000 impressions. In contrast, Google’s organic results typically earns 25% to 35% CTR and display ads often perform near 0.5% to 1%, per Backlinkco.
Takeaway for brands: Gemini 3’s leap forward and ChatGPT’s diminishing user clicks force brands to rethink how they show up in a world where answers live inside the model, not on the open web.
However, Google still dominates search, with 66.9% search platform preference among US users. ChatGPT has grown from 4.1% in 2024 to 12.5% in 2025, per Higher Visibility, indicating that it’s a rising player but that traditional search remains a top discovery channel.
Optimizing for generative engines now and focusing on answer-ready content will drive traffic, monetization, and attribution later as more engagement happens inside AI rather than after clicks.