"What Is the Best Car?" Gets 280,393 AI Searches a Month vs 2,900 on Google

A family shopping for their next vehicle used to type "best SUV 2026" into Google and open five review sites in tabs. Now many of them ask an AI tool "what is the best car" and read one answer. That answer names a handful of models and cites a few sources, and those models are the ones the family goes to see.

For businesses, the questions people ask AI are a practical content list. Each high-volume question is a prompt that AI engines answer thousands of times a month, and the pages they cite shape which brands, products and providers the asker considers next.

The biggest shift is in questions that ask for a judgment. "What is the best car" is asked in AI tools an estimated 280,393 times a month, against 2,900 Google searches, and "what is a stock" draws 450,642 AI searches against 12,100 on Google. Practical how-to questions are different: "how to lose weight" still gets more searches on Google than in AI.

We took the 13,149 question keywords in a set of 50,000 US keywords, questions starting with words like what, how, is, can and which, and grouped them into 31 topics. For each question we used its estimated monthly AI search volume for August 2026, collected on September 23, 2026, and its monthly Google search volume. We ranked the questions by AI volume within each topic and compared the two volumes for each question.

AI search volume is the estimated number of times a month people ask a question in AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google's AI features; for a short, broad question it counts every similar phrasing of that question together. Google search volume is the number of times a month the same words are searched on Google. When a question's AI volume is far above its Google volume, people have moved that question to AI.

That is about 97 AI searches for every Google search. The same pattern runs through every question that asks AI to judge or recommend. "What is the best job" gets 49,008 AI searches against 2,400 on Google, "what stocks to buy" 57,143 against 1,900, and "which is the best ai" 25,394 against 720. "How to get a job in it", a question that needs a personal plan rather than a list of links, draws 69,950 AI searches against 480 on Google.

A Google search for "best car" returns ten links and leaves the judgment to the reader. An AI tool gives the judgment directly, which is why people take these questions there. For a business, "best" questions are where AI picks winners: the answer names a few brands, and the rest are not in it.

The leading questions by AI volume cover everyday life. "What is the weather" draws 457,226 AI searches a month, "what is a stock" 450,642 and "what is the best car" 280,393. Money questions sit near the top: "what is a credit card" draws 131,711 AI searches against 9,900 on Google, and "how to pay taxes" 81,202 against 6,600. "What breed is this dog", a question people answer by showing an AI tool a photo, draws 142,215.

Many of these are basic definitions. "What is a stock" is asked in AI 37 times as often as it is searched on Google, and "what is health insurance" more than nine times as often. People who would once have clicked a dictionary or a bank's glossary page now get the explanation in the answer itself.

Practical questions with a visual or step-by-step answer are more balanced. "How to lose weight" gets 135,000 Google searches a month against 95,419 AI searches, and "how to cook chicken" is close to even at 90,500 on Google and 91,612 in AI. "What type of dog is this" draws 74,000 Google searches against 12,574 in AI, and "how to draw a cat" 60,500 against 7,066.

These are questions where people want to see something: a recipe video, a workout, a drawing tutorial, pictures of dog breeds. Google's image and video results still serve them better than a paragraph of text, so recipe sites, fitness creators and tutorial channels keep more of their search traffic than publishers of definitions and recommendations.

The most-asked question about AI itself is "is this ai generated", at an estimated 39,822 AI searches a month, almost double its 22,200 Google searches. People are pasting text and images into AI tools to ask whether another AI made them. "What is the best ai" follows at 35,254 AI searches, more than five times its 6,600 Google searches.

Start with the "best" questions in your category. If you sell cars, software, financial products or services people compare, the "best" question is asked in AI far more than on Google, and the AI answer names a short list. Publish pages that make the case plainly: who your product is best for, how it compares on price and features, and evidence from real customers. Those are the facts AI engines use when they build a shortlist.

Then cover the definitions. Questions like "what is a stock" or "what is health insurance" are entry points where a clear explainer with the answer in the first sentence gets cited and puts your name in front of someone early. Keep investing in video and images for how-to topics, where Google still wins. Suff Digital works as an ai seo company for brands that want to show up in those answers, finding the high-volume AI questions in each category and building the pages that get cited.

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