Posted on the 30th September 2026 in PHTM News

ARE PEOPLE ‘CHATGPT-ING’ INSTEAD OF GOOGLING?

For years, “Google it” has been part of everyday language. But I increasingly wonder whether we are entering the age of “ChatGPT it”. Consumers are no longer only typing a few words into a search box and working through pages of results. They are asking conversational questions: Where should I eat? Which hotel should I use? And, increasingly, who can get me a taxi?

That matters to our industry. Ofcom measured almost 13 million UK adults visiting ChatGPT in June 2025, more than triple the figure a year earlier. More recently, Yext found that 36.7% of UK consumers had used AI for local search in the previous month. Meanwhile, Department for Transport data shows that people in England average around nine taxi or private-hire journeys a year.

There is no published figure for how many of those taxi journeys begin with ChatGPT, so any estimate must be treated cautiously. But even if only 1% of the taxi demand associated with the UK ChatGPT audience involved an AI search, that could already represent well over 100,000 potential taxi-related opportunities a month. At 3% or 5%, the opportunity moves into several hundred thousand.

Advertising inside ChatGPT makes this particularly interesting. Unlike a traditional keyword advert, ChatGPT Ads can use the context and intent of a conversation to decide what is relevant. A customer asking about wedding transport could therefore be shown a wedding-focused transport advert; somebody arranging an airport journey could see an airport-transfer message. Advertisers can create separate ad groups, creative variations and “context hints” so the platform has the right message available for different customer needs.

The next step is measurement. OpenAI supports conversion tracking and UTM parameters, so a transport operator can tag clicks from a ChatGPT campaign. For a business using a dispatch platform such as iCabbi, those identifiers could potentially be carried into the booking journey and reconciled, via booking data or the iCabbi API, against completed trips. Suddenly we are not just measuring impressions and clicks: we can measure bookings, conversion rate, cost per booking and ultimately return on advertising spend.

For taxi and private-hire operators, the opportunity is not simply another advertising channel. It is the possibility that the customer’s search journey itself is changing. Google did to the Yellow Pages what smartphones did to telephone booking. AI may be the next shift - and our industry should be testing it now, while the market is still young.

Article by David Hunter, CEO, Take Me Group


Read another story