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138 SEO Statistics October 2026

Updated 138 primary-source citations Refreshed monthly

On this page
  1. Key Takeaways
  2. How do people search on Google?
  3. How many clicks does Google send to websites?
  4. How do AI Overviews affect organic traffic?
  5. What does it take to rank on Google?
  6. How healthy is the average website technically?
  7. Does SEO pay off better than paid search?
  8. Methodology and Sources

SEO statistics for 2026 show search growing and clicks shrinking. People have not stopped searching: Google's Search and other revenue grew 17% year over year to $63.27 billion in Q2 2026 (Alphabet, Q2 2026 earnings release, Jul 2026). The clicks are going somewhere else. Not to chatbots, mostly: AI tools send out less than 1% of all web traffic (SparkToro, Jun 2026). Google keeps a growing share of each search on its own pages.

The figures below cover market share, search behaviour, click-through rates, zero-click searches, ranking factors, backlinks, technical health, mobile and local search, costs and returns. Each one links to the organisation that produced it and carries the date of its data. None is copied from another roundup, and the page is refreshed every month.

Key Takeaways

  • Google handled 91.1% of worldwide searches in August 2026 (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026 (SparkToro, data from Similarweb, Jun 2026).
  • For every 1,000 US Google searches, only 232 clicks reach the open web (SparkToro, data from Similarweb, Jun 2026).
  • An AI Overview cuts the top organic result's CTR by 52%, from 20.02% to 9.69%, on US desktop (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • Searchers who saw an AI summary clicked a result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
  • AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users (Google, Jun 2026).
  • Search sends 91.66% of referral traffic worldwide, and AI chatbots send 0.25% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
  • 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old (Ahrefs, May 2025).
  • 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
  • Only 48% of mobile websites pass all three Core Web Vitals (HTTP Archive Web Almanac, Jan 2026).
  • 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier (BrightLocal, Feb 2026).
  • US search advertising revenue reached $114.2 billion in 2025 (IAB and PwC, Apr 2026).
  • The average Google Ads click costs $5.42 in 2026, up from $2.32 in 2016 (WordStream by LocaliQ, May 2026).

How do people search on Google?

Google's lead is not shrinking in any way that changes a traffic plan. What people type into it is concentrated in a small set of queries, and much of it is a brand they already know.

SEO statistics: worldwide search engine market share, August 2025 to August 2026, Google at 91.1% and Bing at 4.5%
Figure 1: Google has held roughly nine in ten searches worldwide for the whole year, with every rival under 5%. Source: StatCounter Global Stats, Search Engine Market Share Worldwide, Aug 2026. Screenshot of the source page, captured 30 Sep 2026.

What is the search engine market share in 2026?

Google holds the large majority of searches, and an even larger share on phones. Bing's share in the US is about twice its worldwide share.

  • Bing holds 4.5% of worldwide search, followed by Yahoo at 1.23%, Yandex at 0.99%, DuckDuckGo at 0.7% and Baidu at 0.62% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • In the US, Google holds 86.1%, Bing 8.92%, Yahoo 2.74% and DuckDuckGo 1.7% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • On mobile, Google's worldwide share rises to 95.59%, and Bing falls to 0.6% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • Microsoft's search advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, grew 10% in the quarter to June 2026 (Microsoft, Jul 2026).

The total keeps rising too: more than 5 trillion searches a year. Google put its total at more than 5 trillion searches a year, the first figure it has published since 2016 (Google, Mar 2025). Then, in the first quarter of 2026, Google Search queries reached an all-time high (Google, May 2026).

Voice is the other channel. About four in ten Americans own a smart speaker, and ownership grew again in 2026 after four flat years.

  • 39% of Americans aged 12 and over own a smart speaker, an estimated 112 million people (Edison Research, Mar 2026).

What do people search for?

More than two in five US Google searches are for brands, and searches that signal a purchase are rare, well under one in a hundred.

Demand is concentrated. The top ten thousand terms carry close to half of all US searches, and the long tail is real but small.

Visual search is growing fast, going by Google's own numbers for Lens:

  • Google Lens handles more than 25 billion queries a month (Think with Google, Dec 2025).
  • One in five Google Lens searches shows commercial intent (Think with Google, Dec 2025).
  • More than 60% of shopping and apparel searches are broad, exploring styles rather than naming a product (Think with Google, Dec 2025).

How do consumers find local businesses?

Through reviews first. Google is still the main review source, but its share is falling as AI tools and Apple Maps grow.

  • 97% of consumers read online reviews of local businesses (BrightLocal, Feb 2026).
  • 41% of consumers always read reviews when browsing for businesses, up from 29% a year earlier (BrightLocal, Feb 2026).
  • Google's share as a review source fell from 83% in 2025 to 71% in 2026 (BrightLocal, Feb 2026).
  • Apple Maps use for reviews nearly doubled, from 14% to 27% (BrightLocal, Feb 2026).

Maps, Google Business Profile and near-me searches are covered in local SEO statistics.

How many clicks does Google send to websites?

Zero-click is now the normal outcome of a Google search. The open web gets what is left after Google's own properties, follow-up searches and ads.

What happens after a US Google search in 2026: 32% end in a click, 39% end with nothing and 29% lead to another search
Figure 2: Two out of three US Google searches produce no click at all, and a quarter of the clicks that do happen stay on Google-owned properties. Source: SparkToro, data from Similarweb, In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click, Apr 2026. Chart published by the source, captured 30 Sep 2026.

What is the zero-click rate in 2026?

Just over two thirds of US Google searches, and the share is still climbing.

  • US zero-click searches stood at 60.45% in 2024, so the share grew 7.5 percentage points in two years (SparkToro, Jun 2026).
  • About 45% of Google searches were zero-click ten years ago (SparkToro, Jun 2026).
  • 39% of US Google searches end the session with no click, and 29% lead to another search (SparkToro, data from Similarweb, Jun 2026).
  • Of the clicks that do happen, 27.38% go to AI Mode, YouTube, Maps or another Google property and 6.01% go to paid ads (SparkToro, data from Similarweb, Jun 2026).
  • Only 0.34% of Google searches moved into AI Mode between January and April 2026 (SparkToro, Jun 2026).
  • 92% to 94% of AI Mode sessions end without a visit to an external site (Semrush, Jul 2025).

What is the organic click-through rate by position?

About one click in five goes to the top result on desktop. That is less than a year ago, and still far more than any other position gets. Below position three, clicks are close to zero.

  • On US desktop in July 2026, position 2 earned a 10.36% CTR and position 3 earned 3.89% (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • Positions 1 to 3 collect roughly 92% of the clicks that reach the top ten results (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • The average first-position CTR was 20.9% over the last 12 months, against 28.0% in the 12 months before (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • Since 2015, position 1 CTR is down 12%, while positions 2 to 10 have lost 40% to 47% of their clicks (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).

Mobile and desktop differ, and in 2026 they moved in opposite directions. Desktop position 1 CTR fell from 45.6% in February 2026 to 14.6% by May, while mobile rose from about 30% to 39% over the same months (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).

Are AI chatbots taking search traffic?

They take attention and send back very few visits. Chatbots have hundreds of millions of users, and only a sliver of them click through to a website.

  • ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users (OpenAI, Feb 2026).
  • About four in ten US adults say they use chatbots to search for information (Pew Research Center, Jun 2026).
  • Measured by referrals to websites, Google holds 99.77% and ChatGPT 0.23% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • Among AI chatbots, ChatGPT sends 79.4% of referrals, Gemini 10.9%, Perplexity 4.31%, Copilot 2.79% and Claude 2.57% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • Google gets under 9% of all web visits but sends more than 60% of all referral traffic to other sites (SparkToro, data from Datos, Dec 2024).

The AI side of search has its own page: AI search statistics.

How do AI Overviews affect organic traffic?

AI Overviews now sit on a large share of results pages, and the organic results under them lose clicks. Being cited helps. It does not bring back the old click rates.

Organic CTR by position on Google US desktop, standard results versus results with an AI Overview, July 2026
Figure 3: The AI Overview line sits well under the standard line for the top three positions and meets it from position five, so the losses land on the results that used to get most of the clicks. Source: Advanced Web Ranking, Google Organic CTR by Position: 2026 Study, Jul 2026. Screenshot of the source page, captured 30 Sep 2026.

How often do AI Overviews appear?

On close to half of sampled desktop results, and far more often on comparisons, questions and long queries than on short or transactional ones.

  • AI Overviews appeared on 43% of sampled US desktop results pages in July 2026 (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • Comparison queries trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time, and question-style queries 85.9% of the time (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
  • AI Overviews show on 36% of informational queries, 8% of commercial queries and 5% of transactional queries (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
  • 18% of the Google searches in Pew's March 2025 panel produced an AI summary (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
  • 53% of searches with 10 or more words produced an AI summary, against 8% of one- or two-word searches (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).

Google's separate AI Mode is growing fast by its own figures, which come from Google and not from an independent panel.

  • AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly active users since it expanded globally in October 2025 (Alphabet, Q2 2026 CEO remarks, Jul 2026).
  • AI Mode queries have more than doubled every quarter since launch (Google, May 2026).

How much do AI Overviews cut organic clicks?

A lot, and the losses stack. On its own, an AI Overview takes a large share of clicks. Add a local pack, product grids and a People Also Ask box, and the top result is left with almost nothing.

  • The presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page (Ahrefs, Feb 2026).
  • Average position 1 CTR for informational keywords fell from 7.6% in December 2023 to 3.9% in December 2025 (Ahrefs, Feb 2026).
  • An AI Overview by itself lowers position 1 CTR by 36%, and combined with a local pack, product grids, People Also Ask and videos, the loss reaches 99% (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • 74.3% of results pages with an AI Overview end without an organic click, against 53.6% of pages without one (Advanced Web Ranking, Sep 2026).
  • 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).

Searchers also end their sessions sooner and rarely touch the sources inside the summary.

  • Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
  • Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% of pages without one (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).

Who gets cited in AI Overviews?

Increasingly, pages that do not rank in the top 10. Ranking and being cited are drifting apart, and the citation is worth having.

  • 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also rank in the top 10, down from 76% a year earlier (Ahrefs, Mar 2026).
  • Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together made up 15% of the sources linked in AI summaries (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
  • 6% of sources linked in AI Overviews were .gov sites, against 2% in standard results (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
  • Brands cited in an AI Overview earn 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that are not cited (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
  • Google says it now sends billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search (Alphabet, Q2 2026 CEO remarks, Jul 2026).

If you want to know whether AI answers mention your brand at all, that is a separate measurement from rankings. The full data set on AI answers is on the AI search statistics page.

What does it take to rank on Google?

Established pages beat new ones for most terms. New pages can rank, but most never do, and Google's updates keep raising the bar for thin content, whoever or whatever wrote it.

Age of pages ranking in Google's top 10 results: 72.9% three years or older, 13.4% two years, 13.7% one year
Figure 4: Nearly three quarters of the pages in Google's top 10 have been live for three years or more, so most rankings are held by pages that were built and then kept. Source: Ahrefs, How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?, May 2025. Chart published by the source, captured 30 Sep 2026.

How hard is it for a new page to rank?

Most new pages never reach the top 10. The few that do usually get there fast.

Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017 (Ahrefs, May 2025). For the pages that make it, the wait is short: 40.82% of the pages that reached the top 10 did so within a month of publication (Ahrefs, May 2025).

The bar also moves. Google changes its ranking systems several times a year, and spam updates now outnumber core updates.

  • Google has confirmed six ranking updates in 2026 so far: core updates in March and May, and spam updates in March, June, August and September (Google Search Status Dashboard, Sep 2026).
  • Google confirmed four ranking updates in 2025: core updates in March, June and December, and one spam update in August (Google Search Status Dashboard, Sep 2026).
  • After the March 2024 core update, Google said its results showed 45% less low-quality, unoriginal content, against the 40% it had expected (Google, Apr 2024).

What kind of content ranks on Google?

Original content that is kept up to date, whoever or whatever wrote it. Google does not penalize AI text as such: most new pages contain some, and fully AI-written pages do reach the top three. They are indexed a little less often.

  • 74.2% of 900,000 new webpages published in April 2025 contained AI-generated content (Ahrefs, May 2025).
  • 2.5% of those new pages were entirely AI-written and 25.8% entirely human-written (Ahrefs, May 2025).
  • 87% of 879 content marketers surveyed use AI to create or help create content (Ahrefs, May 2025).
  • 5.3% of pages ranking in positions 1 to 3 are 100% AI-generated (Ahrefs, Jul 2026).
  • Pages with less than 50% AI content hold 82.2% of top-three rankings (Ahrefs, Jul 2026).
  • 49.28% of low-AI pages were indexed, against 40.35% of pages with very high AI content (Ahrefs, Jul 2026).

SEO professionals rank original content first, then updating what you already have, with technical fixes a close third.

Content budgets, formats and returns are covered in content marketing statistics, and publishing frequency and post length in blogging statistics.

Links still separate pages that rank from pages that do not. SEOs value a good one at several hundred dollars, and most expect the price to keep rising.

The web also keeps losing links, so budget for replacing the ones you lose. A quarter of the pages Pew sampled no longer load:

  • 8% of webpages that existed in 2023 had already disappeared by October 2023 (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
  • 25% of all pages collected from 2013 to 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023 (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
  • 23% of news webpages and 21% of government webpages contain at least one broken link (Pew Research Center, May 2024).
  • 54% of Wikipedia pages have at least one reference link pointing to a page that no longer exists (Pew Research Center, May 2024).

Costs, response rates and tactics are broken down in link building statistics.

How healthy is the average website technically?

Most sites have the basics in place. Speed is the weak spot, worse on phones, and worse again on home pages.

Share of websites with good Core Web Vitals by device, July 2021 to July 2025: desktop 41% to 56%, mobile 32% to 48%
Figure 5: Mobile pass rates have climbed 16 points in four years and still trail desktop by 8, so more than half of mobile sites give visitors a slow or unstable page. Source: HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025: Performance, Jul 2025. Chart published by the source, captured 30 Sep 2026.

How many sites pass Core Web Vitals?

About half on mobile and a little more on desktop. Loading speed (LCP) is where mobile pages fall furthest behind desktop.

The mobile score matters most. Phones carry half of web traffic, and Google indexes every site as a phone sees it.

  • Mobile accounts for 49.36% of worldwide web traffic, desktop 49.11% and tablets 1.54% (StatCounter, Aug 2026).
  • Since July 5, 2024, Google crawls and indexes sites only with Googlebot Smartphone (Google Search Central, Jun 2024).

How common are basic on-page SEO elements?

Titles are almost universal. Meta descriptions, headings and structured data are not, and a third of pages still skip them.

Are websites blocking AI crawlers?

A small but fast-growing minority name AI bots in robots.txt. Very few sites have adopted llms.txt.

Speed and its effect on conversions are covered in conversion rate optimization statistics.

Paid clicks keep getting more expensive while organic clicks get harder to earn. Neither channel is free, and which one wins now depends on the query and on whether an AI Overview sits above it.

US internet advertising revenue by format, 2021 to 2025, with search rising from $78.3 billion to $114.2 billion
Figure 6: Search is still the largest US ad format and grew every year, but video is closing the gap, so paid search keeps getting more crowded. Source: IAB and PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report: Full Year 2025, Apr 2026. Chart published by the source, captured 30 Sep 2026.

How much do SEO services cost?

Most businesses pay somewhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. Agencies and consultants charge more than twice what freelancers do, and prices vary tenfold for work that sounds the same on a proposal.

  • SEO costs $2,917 a month on average (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
  • Agencies charge $3,209 a month on average, consultants $3,250 and freelancers $1,348 (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
  • Local SEO costs $1,557 a month on average (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
  • The average hourly rate for SEO work is $111 (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).
  • 63% of businesses spend between $500 and $5,000 a month on SEO (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).

The work is done by a large and growing profession: close to a million people in the US occupation group that includes search marketing strategists, with growth faster than average.

How B2B and SaaS companies budget for search is covered in B2B SEO statistics.

How much do companies spend on marketing?

Well under a tenth of revenue, barely changed from last year, with a growing slice going to AI. Budgets are flat, so SEO now competes with AI projects for the same money.

What worries SEO teams most is AI answers taking clicks, and whether the budget keeps up.

What does a paid click cost in 2026?

A few dollars per click on Google Ads, and a lead costs more than ten times that. Paid search is the largest digital ad format in the US, though its growth is slowing.

  • Search holds a 38.8% share of US internet advertising revenue (IAB and PwC, Apr 2026).
  • US search ad revenue grew 11.0% in 2025, down from 15.9% growth in 2024 (IAB and PwC, Apr 2026).
  • Paid clicks on Google Search grew 13% year over year in Q2 2026 (Alphabet, Form 10-Q, Jul 2026).
  • Google's average cost per click rose 3% year over year in Q2 2026 (Alphabet, Form 10-Q, Jul 2026).
  • The average Google Ads click-through rate in 2026 is 6.64% (WordStream by LocaliQ, May 2026).
  • The average cost per lead is $66.69, down for the first time in five years but still above the $59.18 of 2016 (WordStream by LocaliQ, May 2026).

AI Overviews are pushing paid and organic click rates in different directions. Paid CTR moved the opposite way on the two kinds of query:

Paid CTR Jan 2025 Feb 2026
Queries without an AI Overview (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026) 26% 21.8%
Queries with an AI Overview (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026) 14.6% 16.2%

For owned channels that do not depend on Google, see email marketing statistics, and for outreach, cold email statistics.

Methodology and Sources

Every statistic on this page was traced to the organisation that produced the data: search engines and their filings, government bodies, research institutes such as Pew and HTTP Archive, and companies that ran their own studies on their own data (vendor research such as Ahrefs, Advanced Web Ranking, Seer Interactive, SparkToro with Similarweb and Datos, BrightLocal, Editorial.Link and WordStream). Each link was opened on 30 September 2026 to confirm the page loads, the number appears on it and the date is right. Vendor studies measure their own panels or customers, so read their numbers as strong signals rather than census counts. We do not cite statistics roundups. The page is refreshed monthly, and fast-moving figures such as CTR, zero-click rates and AI Overview coverage are replaced first.

Glossary

  • SEO: search engine optimization, the work of earning unpaid traffic from search engines.
  • SERP: search engine results page.
  • CTR: click-through rate, clicks divided by impressions.
  • AI Overview: the AI-generated summary Google shows above some search results.
  • AI Mode: Google's conversational, AI-only search experience.
  • Zero-click search: a search that ends without a click to any website.
  • Core Web Vitals: Google's three page experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.
  • Canonical tag: a tag that tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page.
  • llms.txt: a proposed file that lists a site's key pages for AI tools.
  • CPC / CPL: cost per click and cost per lead in paid search.
  • TAC: traffic acquisition costs, what a search engine pays partners to send it searches.

Sources

Cite this page

Every figure here links to the study that produced it. Quote any of them with a link to this page or the original source.

BlazeHive. "138 SEO Statistics October 2026." BlazeHive, October 2026. https://www.blazehive.io/statistics/seo-statistics/
<a href="https://www.blazehive.io/statistics/seo-statistics/">Seo Statistics</a> (BlazeHive, October 2026)