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Students are searching Google less for physics questions as researchers find signs that many are turning to AI chatbots for answers instead.
For about 20 years, a student stuck on a physics problem late at night has opened a search box and typed in the question. Fewer of them do that now.
Searches for the concepts taught in a first physics course fell across more than 20 countries over three school years. The researchers think many of those questions are going to a chatbot instead.
Yossi Ben-Zion and Omer Michaeli, physicists at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, ran the count with Noah Finkelstein at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The team worked from Google Trends, which reports how popular a topic is against everything else people look up.
Every figure here is a share of traffic, then, and not a count of missing questions.
“The findings do not suggest that students are learning less,” said Ben-Zion.
“Rather, they indicate that many students are shifting from searching across multiple websites to receiving direct, conversational explanations from AI systems.”
Physics vocabulary helps reveal which searches are driven by students.
Searches for the technical terms rise toward exams and fall away over breaks, and the everyday words for the same subjects don’t.
In the spring of 2020, the College Board ran its Advanced Placement exams online with nobody watching the test-takers.
The minute the AP Physics C: Mechanics exam opened, searches for core mechanics concepts jumped more than tenfold, then dropped back to normal as soon as the submission deadline passed.
Researchers Eren Bilen and Alexander Matros tracked that hour by hour in a 2021 study.
Students search when they’re stuck, in other words, and they get stuck on a semester schedule. That seasonal shape survived everything that follows.
The team took its topics from the table of contents of an introductory physics textbook and kept the mechanics and electromagnetism entries.
For each of three school years running from August 2022 to August 2025, it pulled 53 weekly readings per topic.
Worldwide, searches for kinetic energy came in about 28% lower in the last of those years than in the first. Newton’s laws of motion fell about 40%, and electric charge and electric field each dropped about 26 percent.
The authors rate all four declines as large on the standard effect measures, and they found a drop on almost every topic they tested.
Page views for those physics articles on Wikipedia declined in seven languages over the same period, suggesting the pattern isn’t simply a quirk of Google’s product.
In English-speaking countries, almost nothing happened. Searches for kinetic energy in the United States slipped about 3%, small enough that the authors treat it as no real change.
Electric field searches actually rose about 7%, and the United Kingdom looked much the same.
Elsewhere the declines were steep. Kinetic energy fell about 52% in South Korea, 50% in Ukraine and 46% in Brazil. Newton’s laws lost 75% of their search traffic in Vietnam.
The Wikipedia numbers are wider still. English page views for kinetic energy fell about 24%, against 73% in Hindi and 61% in Portuguese.
“Generative AI has the potential to reduce the ‘language tax’ faced by millions of students,” the researchers said.
“By making complex scientific concepts more accessible in many languages, these tools may help democratize access to knowledge.”
Inside physics, the decline was uneven. Mechanics lost more search traffic than electromagnetism in every region the team compared, and the American electromagnetism topics held steady or rose slightly.
Ben-Zion’s team offers a reason with nothing to do with geography. Mechanics runs on cause and effect a chatbot can write out in sentences: push this, that moves.
Electric and magnetic fields are a harder ask, the authors argue, because students often learn them from diagrams and graphs rather than verbal explanations alone.
If that holds up, students aren’t abandoning search so much as sorting their questions, and handing over the ones a fluent paragraph can actually answer.
The countries with the steepest physics-search declines also tended to show more interest in ChatGPT.
On the study’s 0-to-100 scale, India averaged 60.4, Brazil 41.3 and Argentina 30.9, against 23.7 in the United States and 19.6 in the United Kingdom.
Iran went the other way, and it’s the more useful case. Google is still the main search engine there, and access to systems like ChatGPT is limited.
Physics searches held steady or rose, and the authors call that a rough counterfactual rather than proof.
Two countries were set aside for the opposite reason. Much of Russia’s searching happens on Yandex, and Google isn’t the dominant engine in mainland China, so Google’s numbers don’t describe either place.
The study tracked search patterns, not individual students.
The data can’t show whether students actually switched to chatbots, what they ask them, or whether the answers they receive are any good.
Chatbots are uneven on that last point: one test scored ChatGPT’s judgment of published scientific claims at the level of a low D on a science exam.
The researchers want studies that follow students as they work to see what changes when AI enters the process. They also see a place for AI inside physics classrooms, but not simply as an answer machine.
A teacher could give students an AI-generated explanation of Newton’s third law and ask them to find what it gets wrong or leaves out.
The chatbot can provide the answer. The student still has to decide whether that answer makes sense.
The full study was published in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research.
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