Finding information is the top reason people use the internet in 2025, according to a new report by media monitoring firm Meltwater. But people are increasingly starting their online experiences on sites other than search engines.
The report also found that streaming is the most popular form of TV watching, but that social media (and particularly short-form video) are eating up more time and attention than traditional TV viewing.
Users spent an average of 11 hours and 39 minutes with online video per week, compared to 10 hours and 15 minutes of traditional TV (including streaming). If you add that to the time spent on social media, short-form video is taking up 13 hours and 48 minutes of attention per person, per week.
Separate figures cited by the Meltwater researchers showed that searches on Google have declined by about a billion searches per month. That’s a drop in the bucket, considering that Google is still the world’s most visited website, with more than 105 billion visits on 5.87 billion unique devices every month.
Still, visits to ChatGPT alone are up by about one billion visits per week. The other top artificial intelligence (AI) tools, in order of popularity, were Google Gemini, DeepSeak, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude.
Regardless of the exact sites users visit, it’s interesting to think about their goals for going online in the first place.
According to the Meltwater report (with original research from the audience targeting firm GWI), finding information is the top goal of 61% of all online sessions.
Coming in at a close second, though, is connection. Global users told researchers that nearly 59% of their time online was spent staying in touch with friends and family, while 55% of the time, the primary reason to go online was to watch videos, shows, and movies.
Other top reasons for going online included keeping up with the news, researching how to do things, listening to music, and finding new ideas or inspiration. Gaming and meeting new people also made the list, but were cited less often than tasks like research, using up spare time, education, managing finances, and accessing healthcare.
These findings dovetail closely with research about which domains users visit most, according to the Meltwater researchers. Google is still on top by a huge margin, and YouTube is in second place with about half as many visits per month. The next most visited sites, in order, were Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, Wikipedia, and Reddit.