The gap is much smaller than people say: roughly 1.5 to 3 times for a short query, which means fractions of a Wh in both cases. For a trivial question (a date, a definition), a conventional search remains slightly less energy-intensive. But an AI query often does the work of several searches, summarising and rephrasing in one go. The best habit is to choose the tool to suit the need, using a lightweight model by default (our comparison of AI models quantifies the gaps).
Read the source article: ChatGPT vs Google search energy: is it 10 times more?