AI Search Statistics You Need to Know in 2026

01 - Key AI search statistics

The numbers most likely to be quoted in 2026, in one place.

• 900M+

  ChatGPT weekly active users

  OpenAI, Feb 2026

• 49%

  of U.S. adults use AI chatbots

  Pew Research Center, 2026

• 68.01%

  of Google searches end without a click

  SparkToro / Similarweb, 2026

• −58%

  CTR for the #1 result when an AI Overview appears

  Ahrefs, 2026

• 4.4×

  value of an AI search visitor vs organic

  Semrush, 2025

• 1,324%

  growth in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites

  Adobe, Oct 2024–May 2026

• ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users, the first time OpenAI publicly cited that mark, alongside more than 50 million consumer subscribers and more than 9 million paying business users.

  Source: OpenAI, reported by Search Engine Land, February 2026

• Google's Gemini app surpassed 900 million monthly active users, up from 400 million a year earlier, with daily requests expanding more than sevenfold.

  Source: Google, Sundar Pichai I/O keynote, 2026

• Google's AI Mode surpassed 1 billion monthly users, with AI Mode queries more than doubling every quarter since launch.

  Source: Google I/O announcements, 2026

• Searching for information is the single most common use of AI chatbots, cited by 42% of U.S. adults - ahead of work tasks (38% of employed adults), entertainment (25%) and image or video creation (24%).

  Source: Pew Research Center, February 2026

• The average AI search visitor is 4.4 times as valuable as the average traditional organic search visit, measured by conversion rate.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

02 - AI search adoption & usage

How many people actually use AI to find things - and how fast that changed.

• The share of Americans who use ChatGPT has more than doubled since 2023, from 18% to 44%. Gemini is used by 24%, Copilot by 17% and Meta AI by 14%.

  Source: Pew Research Center, 2026

• Roughly one-quarter of Americans use AI chatbots daily, including 12% who do so several times a day and 4% who use them almost constantly.

  Source: Pew Research Center, 2026

• 60% of Americans say they read the AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, while 30% say they do not and 10% are unsure.

  Source: Pew Research Center, 2026

• Adults under 50 are about twice as likely as those 50 and older to use ChatGPT - 57% versus 28%.

  Source: Pew Research Center, 2026

• Visits to generative AI platforms reached toward 1.5 billion monthly as of January 2026.

  Source: Similarweb, January 2026

• Monthly referrals from generative AI platforms to websites climbed from roughly 60 million in October 2024 to around 240 million by September 2025, then held flat between 240 and 280 million through January 2026.

  Source: Similarweb, 2026

• Between September 2024 and March 2026, ChatGPT's web visits grew 84%, Gemini grew roughly ninefold on web, and Claude's web traffic rose roughly 770%.

  Source: Similarweb, 2026

• Users arriving from ChatGPT spent 15 minutes on site versus 8 minutes for Google referrals, viewed 12 pages versus 9, and converted on transactional sites at 7% versus 5%.

  Source: Similarweb, 2026

• Only about one-in-ten U.S. adults get news from AI chatbots often (2%) or sometimes (7%), while 75% say they never do.

  Source: Pew Research Center, survey of 5,153 U.S. adults, August 2025

03 - AI Overviews & the zero-click shift

What happens to clicks when an AI answer sits above the results.

• The presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page, up from 34.5% eight months earlier. Position 2 loses 50.8%, position 3 loses 46.4%, position 5 loses 32.6%, position 10 loses 19.4%.

  Source: Ahrefs, 300,000 keywords, February 2026

• 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, up 7.56 percentage points from 60.45% in 2024.

  Source: SparkToro, using Similarweb US desktop and mobile panel data, 2026

• Users ended their browsing session entirely after 26% of visits to a results page with an AI summary, versus 16% of visits to pages without one.

  Source: Pew Research Center, 2025

• 18% of all Google searches in Pew's study generated an AI summary - 12,593 of 68,879 unique searches - and 58% of respondents ran at least one search producing one.

  Source: Pew Research Center, March 2025

• 60% of queries beginning with question words produced an AI summary, as did 53% of searches of 10 words or more, but just 8% of one- or two-word searches.

  Source: Pew Research Center, 2025

• AI Overviews triggered on 6.49% of queries in January 2025, peaked at 24.61% in July 2025, then settled at 15.69% in November 2025, across more than 10 million keywords.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

• Commercial queries triggering AI Overviews rose from 8.15% to 18.57% between October 2024 and October 2025; transactional queries rose from 1.98% to 13.94% and navigational from 0.84% to 10.33%.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

• Google search traffic to publishers declined globally by a third in the year to November 2025, with Google Discover referrals down 21% and US organic search referrals down 38% year on year.

  Source: Chartbeat, published in the Reuters Institute Trends and Predictions 2026 report

• Across 19 Digital Content Next member companies, the median year-over-year decline in Google referral traffic was 10% - 7% for news brands and 14% for non-news brands.

  Source: Digital Content Next, May–June 2025

• News industry respondents expect traffic to decline 43% on average over the next three years, with roughly one-fifth anticipating losses exceeding 75%.

  Source: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2026

User behaviour on a Google results page: with vs without AI summary

04 - What AI engines actually cite

The most practically useful section, and the one where the received wisdom holds up worst.

• YouTube mentions were the single strongest correlate of AI brand visibility, at approximately 0.737 across all three platforms - higher than Domain Rating (0.266–0.326) or any link metric.

  Source: Ahrefs, 2025

• Only 38% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the organic top 10, down from approximately 76% in July 2025.

  Source: Ahrefs, 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million AI Overview URLs, March 2026

• YouTube accounts for 18.2% of non-ranking AI Overview citations and is the most-cited domain overall in AI Overviews, growing 34% over six months.

  Source: Ahrefs, 2026

• Adding JSON-LD schema changed citations by −4.6% in Google AI Overviews, +2.4% in AI Mode and +2.2% in ChatGPT - only the AI Overviews decline was statistically significant - across 1,885 pages measured against 4,000 controls.

  Source: Ahrefs, August 2025–March 2026

• 53% of AI-cited pages use schema markup, but Ahrefs attributes this to correlation with overall site quality rather than schema causing citations.

  Source: Ahrefs, 2026

• 44% of AI Overview citations came from outside the top 20 organic results, with 32% from positions 1–3 and 27% from positions 11–20.

  Source: seoClarity, 5.1 million citations across 362,000 US desktop queries, October 2025

• ChatGPT cites an average of 15 sources per response while Gemini cites an average of 3.

  Source: Semrush 2026 AI Visibility Index, 126 million US prompts, January–April 2026

• On Gemini, the overlap between brands mentioned in an answer and the domains actually cited as sources can be as low as 30% - being named is not the same as being cited.

  Source: Semrush, 2026

• Google AI Mode citations overlapped with the organic top 10 at roughly 54% by domain and 35% by URL, versus roughly 86% domain overlap for AI Overviews and 91%+ for Perplexity.

  Source: Semrush, 5,000 keywords and 150,000+ citations, July 2025

• Wikipedia was ChatGPT's single largest source at 7.8% of citations, while Reddit led Perplexity at 6.6% and Google AI Overviews at 2.2%, across 680 million logged citations.

  Source: Profound, August 2024–June 2025

• Commercial .com domains made up 80.41% of all AI citations analysed, followed by .org at 11.29%.

  Source: Profound, 2025

• ChatGPT cited Reddit in close to 60% of prompt responses in early August 2025, before that share collapsed to around 10% by mid-September 2025. Wikipedia's share fell from roughly 55% to under 20% over the same period.

  Source: Semrush, 230,000 prompts and 100 million citations, July–October 2025

• Google AI Mode responses averaged approximately 300 words, with commercial and transactional responses running about twice as long as informational ones; 92% of AI Mode queries featured a sidebar averaging around 7 unique domains, versus 3 in AI Overviews.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

05 - AI in product discovery & e-commerce

Where AI search stopped being an information channel and became a buying channel.

• AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites grew 138% year over year in May 2026, and converted at a rate 54% better than non-AI sources, based on more than 1 trillion visits.

  Source: Adobe Analytics, 2026

• Consumers arriving from AI referrals spent 53% more time on retail sites and browsed 23% more pages per visit, and were 15% more engaged than non-AI traffic.

  Source: Adobe Analytics, May 2026

• Generative AI drove a 693.4% increase in traffic to U.S. retail sites over the 2025 holiday season, and AI traffic to retail sites rose 670% on Cyber Monday.

  Source: Adobe Analytics, November 1–December 31, 2025

• AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores grew eightfold year over year in Q1 2026, and orders from AI-powered searches increased nearly thirteenfold, with new buyer orders from AI searches occurring at nearly twice the rate of traditional organic search.

  Source: Shopify Q1 2026 earnings call

• Shopify has structured more than 1 billion products with clean attributes, real-time pricing and accurate inventory to make its merchant catalogue readable by AI agents.

  Source: Shopify Q1 2026 earnings call

• More than 250 million customers used Amazon's Rufus AI shopping assistant over the year, with monthly average users up 149% and interactions up 210%; customers who use it are over 60% more likely to purchase during that shopping trip.

  Source: Amazon, 2026

• US e-commerce sales via AI platforms will exceed $20 billion in 2026 and top $144 billion by 2029, counting third-party AI platforms but excluding retailer-native tools.

  Source: EMARKETER, 2026

• 61% of B2C organisations plan to implement agentic AI within the next 12 months, per a survey of 1,100 senior decision makers across five markets.

  Source: Algolia 6th Annual eCommerce Search Report, November 2025

• 83% of B2B sellers now prioritise AI when selecting search tools, and 71% are already using AI in e-commerce operations, up from 67% in 2025.

  Source: Algolia B2B Ecommerce Site Search Trends Report, 2026

• 62% of consumers say they are more likely to make purchases with generative AI-driven guidance, rising to 68% among millennials.

  Source: Coveo, survey of 4,000 US and UK consumers, 2025

• 39% of shoppers surveyed have used generative AI for online shopping, 92% of them said it enhanced their experience, and 87% said they are more likely to use AI for larger or more complex purchases.

  Source: Adobe, survey of 5,000+ respondents, 2025

06 - Consumer behaviour & trust in AI search

Usage is climbing. Trust is not climbing with it.

• 54% of consumers said they had to double-check the accuracy of all information generative AI tools provided, and 62% said information from those tools ended up being a waste of their time.

  Source: Gartner, survey of 846 U.S. consumers, November–December 2025

• 72% of consumers said generative AI appears in their internet and app use whether they asked for it or not.

  Source: Gartner, 2026

• 74% of AI users rate their trust in AI recommendations at 4 or 5 out of 5, yet more than 93% still take at least one verification step - 62% immediately search Google, 58% visit the business's website directly and 52% click through to cited sources.

  Source: Yext Consumer Search Behaviors Report, 2026

• 30% to 45% of US consumers use generative AI for product research and comparison, yet around half remain cautious about letting AI agents autonomously handle purchases end to end.

  Source: Bain & Company Consumer Lab, 2025

• Consumers trust retailers' own on-site AI agents three times more than third-party agents.

  Source: Bain & Company, 2025

• Willingness to let AI narrow choices reached 31% for household supplies and 28% for personal electronics, but willingness to let AI make the actual purchase decision topped out at 11%.

  Source: Gartner, survey of 322 U.S. consumers, January 2026

• 17% of online shoppers said they would begin holiday shopping with an AI platform, versus 30% starting with Google search; among millennials that rose to 52%.

  Source: Bain & Company, November 2025

• 76% of shoppers want to set boundaries for AI assistants, two-thirds trust AI more when it explains its reasoning, and 71% are worried about how generative AI uses personal information.

  Source: Capgemini Research Institute, 12,000 consumers across 12 countries, 2026

• One in four consumers used generative AI shopping tools in 2025 and a further 31% plan to adopt them, though only 19% would pay for a chatbot or virtual shopping assistant subscription.

  Source: Capgemini Research Institute, 2026

07 - Local search & AI assistants

The category where AI adoption moved fastest and AI visibility remains hardest to win.

• Only 1.2% of locations were recommended by ChatGPT, 11% by Gemini and 7.4% by Perplexity - against 35.9% appearing in Google's local 3-pack.

  Source: SOCi Local Visibility Index, nearly 350,000 locations across 2,751 multi-location brands, 2026

• SOCi estimates AI local visibility is three to 30 times harder to achieve than ranking well in traditional local search.

  Source: SOCi, 2026

• Business profile information surfaced by AI assistants was only about 68% accurate on ChatGPT and Perplexity, versus 100% on Gemini, which is grounded in Google Maps.

  Source: SOCi, 2026

• Locations recommended by ChatGPT averaged 4.3-star ratings, versus 4.1 for Perplexity and 3.9 for Gemini - making consumer sentiment one of the strongest influences on AI local recommendations.

  Source: SOCi, 2026

• In retail, only 45% of the top 20 brands by traditional local search visibility also appeared in the top 20 most recommended by AI.

  Source: SOCi, 2026

• 31% of consumers used ChatGPT and 23% used Google's AI Mode for local business recommendations.

  Source: BrightLocal, 2026

• 63% of active AI users trust AI recommendations for local businesses and 42% of all consumers trust AI as much as traditional reviews - but 88% still verify, checking legitimacy (51%) or sources (37%).

  Source: BrightLocal, 2026

• ChatGPT Search drew 58% of its local sources from business websites, 27% from business mentions and 15% from online directories, across 800 manual local queries in 20 US cities and 20 verticals.

  Source: BrightLocal, November 2024

• Wikipedia accounted for 39% of all business-mention sources in ChatGPT Search local results, while Yelp, Facebook and Google Maps did not appear as directory sources at all.

  Source: BrightLocal, 2024

• Google's share of consumers reading local business reviews fell to 71% in 2026, down from 83% in 2025, while ChatGPT and other AI tools rose to 45% and Apple Maps to 27%.

  Source: BrightLocal, 2026

• 82% of consumers read AI-generated review summaries and 23% rely solely on those summaries when making a decision about a local business.

  Source: BrightLocal, 2026

• 31% of consumers now require a minimum 4.5-star rating before using a local business, up from 17% in 2025, and 68% require at least 4 stars, up from 55%.

  Source: BrightLocal, 2026

• 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% now always read reviews when browsing, up from 29% in 2025.

  Source: BrightLocal, 2026

• 46% of consumers always or often add "near me" to their local search queries, and 85% consider contact information and opening hours an important factor when researching local businesses.

  Source: BrightLocal Consumer Search Behavior, 2025

• 13.49% of Google AI Mode queries included a local pack in an analysis of 5,000 keywords.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

08 - How marketers are responding

Enterprise budgets moved early. The broader market did not.

• 97% of enterprise digital leaders reported a positive impact from AEO in 2025, and 94% plan to increase AEO investment in 2026.

  Source: Conductor State of AEO/GEO report, 2026

• Organisations allocated an average of 12% of digital marketing budgets to AEO/GEO in 2025, with 56% making a significant or high investment.

  Source: Conductor, 2026; corroborated by EMARKETER, 2026

• 63% of US marketers said their company is not investing time, budget or staff in GEO, with just 9% of marketing resources allocated to GEO versus 24% for SEO.

  Source: Centerfield Gen-AI Search Readiness Survey, 878 US marketers, September 2025

• 93% of marketers said they face barriers to GEO implementation, with 40% citing budget and 36% citing limited expertise or competing priorities.

  Source: Centerfield, 2025

• Only 33% of marketers said they have a good or expert understanding of GEO, compared with 72% for SEO.

  Source: Centerfield, 2025

• 45% of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure their brand's visibility in AI-generated answers, and only 9% have tools to track all relevant metrics across platforms.

  Source: Semrush 2026 AI Visibility Index

• 81% of organisations that fully integrate SEO and AI visibility into one workflow reported increased traffic or leads from AI platforms - versus 36% of those managing them separately.

  Source: Semrush, 2026

• Only 14% of marketers track AI search citations, even though 89% of brands already appear in AI-powered search results.

  Source: GoodFirms, survey of 100 practitioners, January–February 2026

• 65% of marketers identify AI-driven search changes as their top challenge, while 43% list AI/LLM optimisation as a strategic priority.

  Source: GoodFirms, 2026

• 75% of senior SEOs said the existing SEO team owns AI search efforts, with few dedicated teams created, even though 91% said leadership had requested an AI search visibility assessment in the past year.

  Source: SEOFOMO State of AI Search Optimization Survey, 200+ senior SEOs, 2025

• 62% of SEOs reported that AI search drives less than 5% of their company's revenue.

  Source: SEOFOMO, 2025

• The industry cannot agree what to call the discipline: 36% say "AI search optimization", 27% simply call it SEO for AI platforms, and 18% use "generative engine optimization (GEO)".

  Source: SEOFOMO, 2025

09 - Forecasts & projections

What the analyst houses expect next - presented as forecasts, not facts.

• Gartner forecasts that by 2028, many brands will see organic search site traffic decrease by 50% or more as consumers embrace generative AI-powered search.

  Source: Gartner, February 2024

• Gartner predicted traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026, with search marketing losing share to AI chatbots and virtual agents.

  Source: Gartner, February 2024

• Semrush forecasts AI search visitors will surpass traditional search visitors in 2028 for digital marketing and SEO topics, noting it could happen sooner if Google Search becomes AI Mode by default.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

• Semrush projects AI channels will drive similar global economic value to traditional search by the end of 2027.

  Source: Semrush, 2025

• Deloitte predicts about 29% of adults will initiate one or more searches daily with a generative AI summary in 2026, rising to 40% in 2027 - versus 13% using any standalone generative AI app daily.

  Source: Deloitte TMT Predictions 2026, November 2025

• Deloitte predicts that by mid-2026 more adults will have generated a search overview (72%) than will have used a standalone generative AI tool at any time (61%).

  Source: Deloitte, 2025

• Forrester predicts leading advertisers will cut display ad budgets by 30% in 2026 as AI summaries and chat interfaces shrink addressable audiences on the open web.

  Source: Forrester 2026 B2C Marketing, CX & Digital Predictions, October 2025

• Forrester predicts a third of companies will harm customer experiences with frustrating AI self-service in 2026 as cost pressure pushes premature chatbot deployment.

  Source: Forrester, 2025

• BrightEdge reports AI agent requests have reached 88% of human organic search activity and projects AI agent activity will surpass human-driven search by the end of 2026.

  Source: BrightEdge, April 2026

• AI referral traffic accounts for 1.08% of all website traffic, growing at approximately 1% month over month, across 1,215 enterprise domains and 3.3 billion sessions.

  Source: Conductor AEO/GEO Benchmarks, May–September 2025

• The global GEO services market is projected to grow from $886 million in 2024 to $7.32 billion by 2031, a CAGR of 34.0%.

  Source: Valuates Reports, July 2025

• The global SEO services market is estimated at $83.98 billion in 2026, forecast to reach $148.86 billion by 2031 at a 12.12% CAGR, with voice and visual search SEO the fastest-growing segment at 20.10%.

  Source: Mordor Intelligence, 2026

10 - Methodology & citation policy

Every statistic on this page was taken from a source page that was retrieved and read directly, not from a search-result snippet or a secondary statistics roundup. Each entry carries the name of the organisation that produced the research and the year the data was collected or published.

Figures were quoted as published, without rounding or extrapolation. Where a widely circulated number could not be traced to a retrievable primary source, it was excluded rather than repeated. Where two credible sources disagree, both are shown with their attributions and dates.

Several sources measure related but non-identical things: platform-reported user counts differ from panel-measured behaviour, domain-level citation overlap differs from URL-level overlap, and enterprise survey samples differ markedly from broad-market ones. Those distinctions are noted where they materially affect interpretation.

Source organisations: Adobe Analytics · Ahrefs · Algolia · Amazon · Bain & Company · BrightEdge · BrightLocal · Capgemini Research Institute · Centerfield · Chartbeat · Conductor · Coveo · Deloitte · Digital Content Next · EMARKETER · Forrester · Fractl · Gartner · GoodFirms · Google · Mordor Intelligence · OpenAI · Pew Research Center · Profound · Reuters Institute · Search Engine Land · Semrush · seoClarity · SEOFOMO · Shopify · Similarweb · SOCi · SparkToro · Valuates Reports · Yext

Common questions