Do buyers ask AI assistants longer questions than Google?

How long are AI prompts compared to Google searches?

Longer in most modes, depending on where the question is typed. Scrunch puts Google AI Mode queries at 12.0 words against 4.0 for classic search.

That AI Mode figure comes from Scrunch's research on query behavior, which cites Alphabet's Q4 2025 earnings report. Three times the words, on the same Google page.

ChatGPT is harder to sum up in one figure. Semrush's study of ChatGPT clickstream data covers over 1 billion lines of US data from October 2024 to February 2026 and splits prompts by whether ChatGPT searched the web. Prompts that triggered a search averaged 8.7 words in January and February 2026, and prompts that did not averaged 13.5. A single ChatGPT average blends the two groups.

Why are ChatGPT prompts that trigger search shorter?

Semrush's data shows that they are shorter without saying why. Our reading is that a prompt asking for current facts reads like a lookup, while one asking ChatGPT to write something carries its own material.

The gap is closing from both ends. A year earlier, search prompts averaged 4.7 words and prompts without search 24.9. By early 2026 the first group had nearly doubled and the second had nearly halved.

Search prompts are the smaller group, too. Only 34.5 percent of queries in Semrush's February 2026 data had search enabled, so most ChatGPT prompts are answered without a web search.

For a business, the longer search prompts matter more. A buyer asking ChatGPT to compare vendors now writes closer to a sentence than a keyword, and that prompt is the one that can bring a page into the answer, which our guide to AI search covers.

What do the searches ChatGPT runs behind the scenes look like?

They read like full questions now, at about 12 words each in January 2026. Peec measured them at about 6 words in October 2025.

When ChatGPT searches, it writes its own queries, which Peec calls fan-out searches. Peec's analysis of 20 million fan-out searches tracked their length. The count per prompt stayed between 2.3 and 2.8. The length doubled.

There is the 12 again. Scrunch's figure for what a person types into AI Mode and Peec's figure for what ChatGPT types on that person's behalf came out at the same length, a few months apart.

Length changes what Google shows, too. In Peec's test of 500,000 prompts, run from 13 to 20 April 2026, Google served an AI Overview for 64.6 percent of two-word queries and 89.1 percent of queries between 11 and 15 words.

How should a page be written for a full-sentence question?

State the question the way a buyer would say it, with its context, and answer it in the first lines below.

Compare "CRM pricing" with what a buyer might ask an assistant: what a CRM costs for a team of eight that already pays for Google Workspace. The second version names a team size and a tool the answer has to account for. A page written for it puts both in the heading or first sentence, then answers.

The best source of that phrasing is your own sales calls. Call transcripts hold buyers' questions in full sentences, with the details they think matter, and our post on customer questions walks through turning them into answers.

In our AI search work, we rewrite a client's pages so each one states a buyer's full question and answers it in the first lines. Wording is one input, and cited pages differ by tool, as our comparison of ChatGPT and AI Overviews found. Expect any movement from rewritten pages to take one to three months.

Do keyword tools still help?

For classic Google search and for choosing topics, yes. For the wording of AI prompts, much less, since Semrush could not match 65 to 85 percent of prompts to any keyword in its 27 billion keyword database.

That is a keyword company describing its own database. The 4-word Google query has not gone anywhere, and a keyword tool still shows which subjects people search for. What it cannot show is the sentence around the keyword, the team of eight and the Google Workspace account the buyer typed into ChatGPT.