123 AI Search Statistics October 2026

AI search statistics for 2026 show heavy use and thin traffic. In three and a half years, generative AI has reached regular use by about 2.5 billion people (Cloudflare, Jul 2026), and most of them meet it inside Google, not in a chatbot. The answers they read are built from websites. Few of those readers ever visit one.

Every number on this page links to the organisation that collected the data: platform owners, research institutes, clickstream panels and the SEO vendors that ran their own studies. Vendor research is named as vendor research, so you can weigh it. For the wider picture of organic search, rankings and budgets, see our SEO statistics hub.

How are people using AI assistants?

The audience is no longer early adopters. Google reaches more people with AI than any chatbot does, for a plain reason: its AI sits inside a search box people already use.

How many people use ChatGPT and Gemini?

ChatGPT is still the biggest standalone assistant, and Gemini is the only one anywhere near its size.

• ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers in February 2026 (OpenAI, Feb 2026).
• 44% of US adults say they use ChatGPT, up from 34% in 2025 and 18% in 2023 (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• Adults under 50 are about twice as likely as older adults to use ChatGPT, 57% against 28% (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• Six months after signing up, ChatGPT users send 50% more messages a day than in their first month (OpenAI, Jun 2026).
• The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, and its daily users tripled in a year (Google, Jul 2026).
• Daily requests to the Gemini app grew more than sevenfold between I/O 2025 and I/O 2026 (Google, May 2026).
• 24% of US adults say they use Gemini, making it the second most used chatbot after ChatGPT (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• Google says AI Mode, like AI Overviews, is bringing in additional Search queries (Google, Jul 2026).

Which other AI assistants are gaining users?

Claude is growing fastest, and Gemini has taken the most share from ChatGPT. The smaller assistants together now reach a large minority of adults.

• Gemini went from under 9% to about 27% to 28% of generative AI web traffic in a year, and Claude from about 2% to close to 9% (Similarweb, Jul 2026).
• Claude's worldwide app monthly active users grew about 1,318% between June 2025 and May 2026, the fastest growth of any major assistant (Similarweb, Jul 2026).
• 17% of US adults use Copilot, 14% Meta AI, 8% Grok and 6% Claude (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• Microsoft has more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats (Microsoft, Jul 2026).
• Generative AI sites averaged 9.5 billion web visits a month worldwide, up 70%, from 655 million unique visitors (Similarweb, Jul 2026).
• About a quarter of US adults use AI chatbots every day, including 12% who use them several times a day (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• 64% of US teens say they use AI chatbots, a higher share than their parents report (Pew Research Center, Feb 2026).

What do people use AI assistants for?

Looking things up, more and more of it outside work. News is a small but growing use.

• Looking things up grew from 14% to 24% of all ChatGPT messages between July 2024 and July 2025 (NBER, Sep 2025).
• Messages unrelated to work rose from 53% to 73% of ChatGPT use between June 2024 and June 2025 (NBER, Sep 2025).
• 57% of US teens have used chatbots to search for information (Pew Research Center, Feb 2026).
• Among people who use AI models, 68% use them to research and summarise information and 42% for shopping recommendations (Bain & Company, Feb 2025).
• 39% of US consumers have used AI assistants for online shopping, and 85% of them say it improved the experience (Adobe, Jun 2026).
• Weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% of people across markets in a year (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• People aged 18 to 24 are three times as likely as those over 55 to use chatbots for news, 17% against 5% (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• 13% of US adults use chatbots to get news (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).

How is AI changing Google search?

Not by taking its volume. Google still answers far more questions than any chatbot. The change is on Google's own results page, where AI Overviews now sit above the links for a large and growing share of searches.

How big is AI search compared with Google?

A small fraction of it, on every measure below. Even inside Google, the dedicated AI mode has barely moved search behaviour.

• ChatGPT's search-like prompts add up to about 12% of Google's search volume (Ahrefs, Feb 2026).
• ChatGPT's click-through rate to websites is 96% lower than Google's (Ahrefs, Feb 2026).
• Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year (Google, Mar 2025).
• Only 0.34% of US Google searches moved into AI Mode between January and April 2026 (SparkToro, Jun 2026).
• In the EU and UK, AI tools reached 1.91% of desktop activity in Q2 2026, up from 1.34% twelve months before, while traditional search held 11.63% (Datos, Jul 2026).
• US use of AI tools peaked at 1.10% of monthly desktop activity in May 2026, then eased slightly in June (Datos, Jul 2026).
• Google held between 92.4% and 94.0% of US desktop search through Q2 2026, and Bing peaked at 5.36% in April (Datos, Jul 2026).

What share of searches show an AI Overview?

Somewhere between a fifth and a half of them, depending on the study. Each one tracks its own keyword set, so the estimates differ, and the commercial share is climbing fastest.

• Across 146 million results pages, AI Overviews appeared for 21% of keywords (Ahrefs, Nov 2025).
• 25.11% of 21.9 million US Google searches produced an AI Overview in a four-week sample (Conductor, Nov 2025).
• In Pew's browsing panel, 18% of Google searches produced an AI summary in March 2025 (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• When they do appear, AI Overviews now average more than 1,200 pixels tall, enough to push organic results below the fold on a standard screen (BrightEdge, Feb 2026).
• The share of commercial-intent results pages with an AI Overview grew 71% in six months, while transactional pages fell 5% (Semrush, Jul 2026).
• Finance saw the largest jump, with commercial queries triggering AI Overviews up 231% (Semrush, Jul 2026).
• Health care searches carried the most AI Overviews at 48.75%, and real estate the fewest at 4.48% (Conductor, Nov 2025).

Which queries trigger AI Overviews?

Long, question-shaped and comparison searches get one most often. Short and transactional searches rarely do.

• 36% of informational queries show an AI Overview, against 8% of commercial and 5% of transactional queries (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Among 30,842 tracked informational queries, comparison queries triggered an AI Overview 95.4% of the time and question-format queries 85.9% (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Informational "near me" queries showed an AI Overview 76.9% of the time (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026). More on local search in our local SEO statistics.
• 46% of queries with seven or more words trigger an AI Overview, against 7.9% of local searches (Ahrefs, Nov 2025).
• Short searches rarely get one: 8% of one- or two-word searches produced an AI summary, against 53% of searches of ten words or more (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).

What happens to clicks when an AI answer appears?

Clicks fall. Every independent study we checked finds a drop, and they disagree on the size of it. The pages that still win clicks are the ones the AI answer cites.

How many Google searches end without a click?

Most of them, and the share is growing faster since AI Overviews arrived. An AI summary also makes people more likely to stop searching altogether.

• US zero-click searches stood at 60.45% in 2024 and about 45% ten years earlier (SparkToro, Jun 2026).
• Searches that led to a click of any kind fell by 9.51 points between 2024 and 2026, a 22.9% decline (SparkToro, Jun 2026).
• People ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% of pages with only regular results (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• About 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results for at least 40% of their searches (Bain & Company, Feb 2025).
• Bain estimates this behaviour cuts organic web traffic by 15% to 25% (Bain & Company, Feb 2025).

How much do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

Sharply for pages the answer leaves out. Being cited in it wins back part of the loss, though not all of it.

• Searchers who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% for those who saw none (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• The links inside the AI summary itself drew a click on 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview recovered from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026 (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• On queries without an AI Overview, organic CTR rose from 2.8% in January 2025 to 3.8% in February 2026 (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Paid CTR did better, edging up from 14.6% to 16.2% on AI Overview queries over the same period (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Brands cited in an AI Overview earned 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands on the same results page, though still 38% fewer than on pages with no AI Overview (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Where an AI Overview appeared and the brand was not cited, organic CTR fell 67% over 2025, about 13,000 fewer clicks per million impressions (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).

How much do people trust AI-generated answers?

Enough to read them without checking. Trust in AI more broadly is slipping, most of all among younger adults.

• Six in ten US adults say they read the AI summaries at the top of search results (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• Across 27 markets, 4% of people say they always or often click through from an AI chatbot to the original source (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• 66% of US consumers agree that generative AI provides accurate results (Adobe, Jun 2026).
• 28% of US adults say chatbots help how informed they are, against 5% who say they hurt (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
• 39% of Americans believe AI does more harm than good, up from 31% in 2025 (Gallup, Jul 2026).
• 47% of Americans aged 18 to 29 believe AI does more harm than good, up from 36% the year before (Gallup, Jul 2026).
• 27% of Americans trust businesses a lot or some to use AI responsibly, down from 31% (Gallup, Jul 2026).

How much traffic do AI chatbots send to websites?

Very little so far, and the traffic search is losing is not moving to chatbots. What AI does send is growing fast and arrives closer to a decision, so judge it by conversions, not by its share of visits.

How much referral traffic comes from AI platforms?

About one visit in a hundred, concentrated in shopping, news and travel. ChatGPT sends most of it.

• AI referrals made up 1.08% of all website traffic across 10 industries and 3.3 billion sessions (Conductor, Nov 2025).
• Marketplaces received the most AI referrals at 46.8 million visits a month, with news and travel tied at 44.5 million each (Similarweb, Sep 2026).
• AI referrals to marketplaces climbed from 33.2 million in June 2025 to 89.9 million in May 2026 (Similarweb, Sep 2026).
• AI referral traffic to beauty sites grew 312.5% in a year and to fashion sites 278.2% (Similarweb, Sep 2026).
• Finance sites received 19.1 million AI referrals a month, up 236.5% on the year (Similarweb, Sep 2026).
• IT had the highest AI referral share of any industry at 2.80% of its traffic, and communication services the lowest at 0.25% (Conductor, Nov 2025).
• ChatGPT sent 87.4% of all AI referral traffic in Conductor's sample (Conductor, Nov 2025).
• Before ChatGPT changed how it links, about 26% to 29% of its referrals went to homepages. By late May 2026 the share was about 62% to 63% (Similarweb, Jul 2026).

Do visitors from AI search convert better?

• Yes, and the gap has flipped in a year. AI-referred shoppers generated 53% more revenue per visit than other traffic, a year after non-AI visits were worth 128% more (Adobe, Jun 2026).
• AI-driven traffic to US retail sites grew 138% year over year in May 2026 (Adobe, Jun 2026).
• AI-referred retail visitors viewed 23% more pages per visit than other visitors (Adobe, Jun 2026).
• Traffic from AI sources to US retail sites was up 393% on the year in the first quarter of 2026 (Adobe, Apr 2026).
• On Ahrefs' own site, 0.5% of visits came from AI search but produced 12.1% of signups (Ahrefs, Jun 2025). Benchmarks by channel are in our conversion rate optimization statistics.

Is Google still the main source of website traffic?

• Yes, by a wide margin. Google accounts for about 88% of referral traffic on Cloudflare's network (Cloudflare, Jul 2026).
• Across 112,309 sites in August 2026, Google sent 24.24% of all visits and AI assistants combined sent 0.41% (Ahrefs, Aug 2026).
• Google says total organic click volume from Search to websites has been relatively stable year over year (Google, Aug 2025).
• Google search queries hit an all-time high in Q1 2026 (Google, Apr 2026).
• Alphabet's Search and Other revenue grew 17% year over year in Q2 2026 (Google, Jul 2026).

The visitors themselves are changing. For the first time, more than 50% of internet traffic became non-human in 2026 (Cloudflare, Jul 2026). AI training is now the main reason crawlers show up: 52% of crawler requests were for training in June 2026, up from 22% in spring 2025 (Cloudflare, Jul 2026). Some of the most heavily crawled categories saw human traffic fall by as much as 40% in under a year (Cloudflare, Jul 2026).

Which sources do AI engines cite?

Mostly other people's pages. Brands are mentioned far more often than their own sites are cited, and ranking first on Google no longer guarantees a place in the answer. Coverage on other sites does more for a brand's AI visibility than the brand's own pages.

Do AI Overviews cite the pages that rank?

Often not. Most cited pages sit outside Google's top ten, and a handful of big platforms take a noticeable share.

• 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews rank in the top 10, 31.2% rank 11 to 100 and 31.0% sit outside the top 100 (Ahrefs, Mar 2026).
• BrightEdge found an even lower overlap: about 17% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in the organic top 10 (BrightEdge, Feb 2026).
• YouTube URLs made up 18.2% of AI Overview citations that did not rank in the top 100 (Ahrefs, Mar 2026).
• Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together made up 15% of the sources linked in Google's AI summaries (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).

What kinds of sources do ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude cite?

Journalism and reference sites, far more than anything a brand pays for. Each assistant leans on a different favourite.

• Journalism accounts for about 27% of AI citations, while paid and advertorial content accounts for 0.3% (Muck Rack, May 2026). Earning those mentions is the subject of our link building statistics.
• ChatGPT cites a source most often and Claude least, though Claude packs the most links into each answer it does source. ChatGPT cites in 96% of responses with about 5 citations each, Gemini in 82% with about 8, and Claude in 55% with about 13 (Muck Rack, May 2026).
• ChatGPT's most cited domain is Wikipedia, Claude's is PubMed Central and Gemini's is Reddit (Muck Rack, May 2026).
• The share of US ChatGPT prompts answered with a citation rose from about 1.6% in June 2025 to about 6.8% in May 2026 (Similarweb, Jul 2026).
• Travel and hospitality prompts carry a citation about 23% of the time and automotive about 20%, against under 4% for professional services (Similarweb, Jul 2026).

What predicts whether a brand gets mentioned?

Mentions elsewhere, above all on YouTube. The size of the brand's own site barely registers.

• Across 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions had the strongest correlation with AI visibility, at about 0.737 (Ahrefs, Dec 2025).
• The number of pages on a brand's site showed almost no relationship with AI visibility, at about 0.194 (Ahrefs, Dec 2025).
• In news and media, the three most visible brands take 82.9% of AI visibility, against 41.4% in finance (Semrush, Jun 2026).
• On Gemini, the overlap between brands mentioned and domains cited can be as low as 30% (Semrush, Jun 2026).

How are marketers responding to AI search?

Budgets are moving before measurement has caught up. Most teams now spend on AI visibility and few can say what it returns. Some popular tactics show no measurable effect at all.

How much are companies investing in AEO and GEO?

A meaningful slice of digital budgets already, and most marketers plan to add more.

• Enterprises put an average of 12% of their digital marketing budgets into AEO in 2025 (Conductor, Jan 2026).
• 97% of CMOs and digital leaders say AEO had a positive impact on their marketing funnel in 2025 (Conductor, Jan 2026).
• 56% of CMOs and digital leaders made a significant or high investment in AEO in 2025 (Conductor, Jan 2026).
• Asked where they will spend more, 37.7% of marketers name AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, the top answer (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 40.6% of marketers name updating SEO for search changes as a top trend they are acting on this year (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 70.2% of marketers believe they can adapt their strategy to changes in organic search such as AI Overviews (HubSpot, Apr 2026). How that plays out in content budgets is covered in our content marketing statistics.

Do marketers know what works in AI search yet?

Not yet. Measurement lags the spending, and at least one popular tactic shows no effect at all.

• 45% of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure their brand's visibility in AI answers, and only 9% have tools that track every relevant metric (Semrush, Jun 2026).
• 81% of organisations that run SEO and AI visibility as one workflow report more traffic or leads from AI platforms, against 36% of those that run them separately (Semrush, Jun 2026).
• 28% of 137,000 domains publish an llms.txt file, and 97% of those files received no requests in May 2026 (Ahrefs, Jun 2026).
• Searches for "generative engine optimization" rose 997% over 18 months (Ahrefs, Jul 2026).
• Searches for "ai search tracking" rose 184% and "ai rank tracking" 175% in a year (Ahrefs, Jul 2026).
• About 26% of ChatGPT responses now contain an ad, adding paid placement around the answers brands compete to appear in (Similarweb, Jul 2026).
• News publishers expect traffic from search engines to fall by 43% over the next three years (Reuters Institute, Jan 2026).

Methodology and Sources

We included a number only after tracing it to the organisation that produced it and opening that page to confirm the figure and its date. Figures quoted in roundups, including competitor statistics pages, were followed back to the original study or dropped. Vendor studies from Ahrefs, Semrush, Similarweb, BrightEdge, Conductor, Seer Interactive and Adobe are included where the vendor collected the data, and are named in every citation. Where two studies measure the same thing differently, such as how often AI Overviews appear, we list both with their method rather than picking one. Fast-moving usage and traffic figures are from the last six months where they exist. Older behavioural studies carry their date. This page is checked and refreshed monthly.

Sources

• Adobe, Q3 AI Traffic Trends Report
• Adobe, AI traffic grows but retail sites lag in AI search visibility
• Ahrefs, AI vs Search Traffic Analysis
• Ahrefs, ChatGPT Has 12% of Google's Search Volume but Google Sends 190x More Traffic to Websites
• Ahrefs, Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
• Ahrefs, What Triggers AI Overviews? 86 Factors and 146 Million SERPs Analyzed
• Ahrefs, Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10
• Ahrefs, Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews
• Ahrefs, Does AI Search Traffic Convert Better Than Traditional Search?
• Ahrefs, 5 AI Search Trends I'm Seeing in 2026
• Ahrefs, We Analyzed 137K Sites: 97% of llms.txt Files Never Get Read
• Bain & Company, Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing
• BrightEdge, AI Overviews at the One-Year Mark
• Cloudflare, Content Independence Day, one year on
• Conductor, The 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks Report
• Conductor, The State of AEO/GEO in 2026: CMO Investment Report
• Datos, State of Search Q2 2026 (preview)
• Gallup, Americans Cool Toward AI
• Google, Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call remarks
• Google, Alphabet Q1 2026 earnings call remarks
• Google, I/O 2026 opening keynote
• Google, AI in Search: Driving more queries and higher quality clicks
• Google, AI, personalization and the future of shopping
• HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing
• Microsoft, FY26 Q4 earnings
• Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading? May 2026
• NBER, How People Use ChatGPT (Working Paper 34255)
• OpenAI, The work now within reach
• OpenAI, Scaling AI for everyone
• OpenAI, How ChatGPT adoption has expanded
• Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026
• Pew Research Center, How Teens Use and View AI
• Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears
• Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026: Emerging uses of AI chatbots for news
• Reuters Institute, Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2026
• Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update
• Semrush, AI Overviews are expanding across commercial intent search
• Semrush, 2026 AI Visibility Index
• Similarweb, AI Search Stats in 2026
• Similarweb, AI Referral Traffic by Industry: 2026 Data
• SparkToro, In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click

Glossary

• AI Overview (AIO): the AI-generated summary Google shows above regular results for some searches.
• AI Mode: Google's conversational search mode, where the whole results page is an AI answer with links.
• AEO: answer engine optimization, making content easy for AI assistants to find, quote and cite.
• GEO: generative engine optimization, another name for the same work, focused on generative AI answers.
• CTR: click-through rate, the share of people who see a result and click it.
• Zero-click search: a search that ends without a click to any website.
• AI referral traffic: visits that arrive from a link inside an AI assistant's answer.
• LLM: large language model, the type of AI model behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
• llms.txt: a proposed file that lists a site's key pages for AI tools to read.
• WAU / MAU: weekly and monthly active users.