Google Searches Plummet as Students Turn to AI Chatbots for Physics Answers

Physicists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the University of Colorado Boulder have been studying search trends on Google to understand how students are using AI chatbots for answers. The team used Google Trends, which reports how popular a topic is against everything else people look up.

The researchers found that searches for physics concepts taught in a first-year course fell across more than 20 countries over three school years. This decline was not uniform and varied by region, with some countries showing steeper drops than others.

Interestingly, mechanics questions disappeared faster than electromagnetism topics, which the authors argue is because mechanics can be explained using cause-and-effect relationships that chatbots can easily write out in sentences. Electric and magnetic fields, on the other hand, are often learned from diagrams and graphs rather than verbal explanations alone.

The study also found a correlation between countries with steeper physics-search declines and increased interest in ChatGPT. However, Iran stood out as a counterexample, where physics searches held steady or rose despite limited access to systems like ChatGPT.