For twenty-five years, dominating Google meant dominating the internet. In April 2026, that equation quietly stopped holding. Our analysis of 4.2 million queries run through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude between January and April of this year shows that 68% of answers generated in Portuguese and Spanish do not include a single citation from Google's top ten organic results for the same query.
That number alone is unsettling. It gets more serious beside another one: in 41% of answers, the engine cites sources that do not appear even in the top one hundred positions of traditional search. In other words, the funnel that marketing teams have been optimizing for two decades is being bypassed by an entirely new selection mechanism — one nobody fully understands.
The new funnel
In studies we ran together with the University of São Paulo and IE Business School in Madrid, the behavior is consistent: consumers in Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking markets are adopting chatbots for high-consideration decisions — choosing a bank, a health plan, a university — faster than they adopted any new search technology since Google itself.
"The problem is not that SEO is dead. The problem is that it has become necessary but no longer sufficient. There is a second funnel now, and it does not follow the same rules."
The data
We split the 4.2M queries into three buckets: informational, comparative and transactional. The bucket that diverges most from Google is, surprisingly, comparative — exactly where buying decisions are made.
Who won
Brands with strong presence in specialist media, academic papers and structured databases benefited disproportionately.
Developing story. We'll update as new data is validated by the team.