# AI Search Statistics 2026: 90+ Numbers From Primary Sources

ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok users, Google AI Overviews, clicks, AI referral traffic, citations, crawlers and trust. Every figure links to the organization that produced it, shows when the data was collected, and was checked on October 24, 2026.

By Daniel Borodin (Founder, GEOHATS) · Updated October 24, 2026 · https://geohats.com/blog/ai-search-statistics-2026

Quick answer

AI search is mainstream. ChatGPT has **more than 1 billion weekly users** (OpenAI, August 2026), Google's AI Overviews over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode over 1 billion. People click regular results less under an AI summary (8% vs 15% of visits, Pew), yet brands cited inside an AI Overview earn 120% more clicks per impression (Seer Interactive).

Last updated: October 24, 2026. Every figure on this page was opened at its primary source and checked October 24, 2026.

Most "AI search statistics" pages copy each other. A number gets quoted by one blog, rounded by the next, and ends up credited to nobody. This page works the other way around: every figure links to the organization that produced it, shows when the data was collected, and was opened at that source on the day we published. Numbers we could only find on roundup sites are not here.

Each source is labelled by type. **Company figures** are what OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and SpaceX report about their own products. **Independent research** means Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute and peer-reviewed papers. **Vendor studies** come from companies that sell SEO, analytics or AI visibility software (Ahrefs, Semrush, Similarweb, Seer Interactive, Peec AI, Profound, Adobe). **Network data** is what Cloudflare and Vercel see on their own infrastructure. Vendor numbers are often the best public data available, but their samples are their own customers or panels, so read them as directional.

## The 12 AI search numbers to know in 2026

If you read one table, read this one. Every row is repeated with more context in the sections below.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **1 billion+** | ChatGPT weekly active users | [OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/expanding-access-to-ai-with-chatgpt-ads/) | Aug 2026 |
| **950 million** | Gemini app monthly active users | [Alphabet](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) | Jul 2026 |
| **2.5 billion+** | Google AI Overviews monthly active users | [Google](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/sundar-pichai-io-2026/) | May 2026 |
| **1 billion+** | Google AI Mode monthly active users | [Alphabet](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) | Jul 2026 |
| **About half** | US adults who use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024 | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/) | Feb 2026 |
| **8% vs 15%** | Google visits where users clicked a regular result, with vs without an AI summary | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) | Mar 2025 |
| **58%** | Lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/) (vendor study) | Dec 2025 |
| **+120%** | More organic clicks per impression when a brand is cited in the AI Overview vs not cited | [Seer Interactive](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update) (vendor study) | Jan 2025 to Feb 2026 |
| **770.7 million** | Average monthly referral visits from AI platforms to websites worldwide, up 117.4% year over year | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/ai-referral-traffic-by-industry/) (vendor study) | Jun 2025 to May 2026 |
| **42% better** | Conversion of AI-referred traffic vs non-AI traffic on US retail sites (a record high) | [Adobe](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable) (vendor study) | Mar 2026 |
| **37.9%** | URLs cited in AI Overviews that also rank in Google's top 10, down from about 76% | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-citations-top-10/) (vendor study) | Published Mar 2026 |
| **52%** | Crawler requests made for AI training, up from 22% in spring 2025 | [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) (network data) | Jun 2026 |

## How many people use AI assistants in 2026?

More than a billion people use ChatGPT each week, Google's Gemini app has 950 million monthly users, and about half of American adults now use a chatbot. ChatGPT still leads by a wide margin, but its share of AI web traffic fell from roughly three quarters to about half in a year as Gemini and Claude grew faster.

### What the companies report

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **1 billion+** | Weekly active users of ChatGPT | [OpenAI, ChatGPT Ads milestone](https://openai.com/index/expanding-access-to-ai-with-chatgpt-ads/) (company figure) | Aug 2026 |
| **700 million** | ChatGPT weekly active users when OpenAI published its usage study, for scale a year earlier | [OpenAI, How people are using ChatGPT](https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/) (company figure) | Sep 2025 |
| **49%** | ChatGPT consumer messages classed as "Asking", the largest category ("Doing" is 40%) | [OpenAI and Harvard's David Deming, NBER working paper](https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/) | 2025 (published Sep 2025) |
| **3 in 4** | ChatGPT conversations focused on practical guidance, seeking information and writing | [OpenAI, NBER working paper](https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/) | 2025 (published Sep 2025) |
| **About 70%** | ChatGPT consumer usage that is not work-related | [OpenAI, NBER working paper](https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/) | 2025 (published Sep 2025) |
| **$1 billion** | Annualized revenue run rate of ChatGPT Ads, reached in less than 200 days after launch | [OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/expanding-access-to-ai-with-chatgpt-ads/) (company figure) | Aug 2026 |
| **950 million** | Monthly active users of the Gemini app | [Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) (company figure) | Jul 2026 |
| **3x** | Growth in Gemini app daily active users over the past year ("tripling") | [Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) (company figure) | Jul 2026 |
| **117 million** | Monthly active users of Grok's AI features, up from 89 million on December 31, 2025 | [SpaceX Form S-1/A, SEC filing](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026040364/spaceexplorationtechnologib.htm) (company figure) | Mar 31, 2026 |
| **150 million+** | Monthly active users of Microsoft's "first party family of Copilots" (work, coding, security, consumer and more combined) | [Microsoft FY26 Q1 earnings call](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2026/earnings-fy-2026-q1) (company figure) | Oct 2025 |
| **1 billion** | Bing monthly active users, reached "for the first time" | [Microsoft FY26 Q3 earnings call](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/events/fy-2026/earnings-fy-2026-q3) (company figure) | Apr 2026 |

### What surveys and traffic panels show

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **About half** | US adults who use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024 | [Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/) (independent research, 5,119 adults) | Feb 17 to 23, 2026 |
| **24%** | US adults who use chatbots daily, including 4% "almost constantly" | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/) (independent research) | Feb 2026 |
| **44%** | US adults who report using ChatGPT, up from 34% a year earlier | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/) (independent research) | Feb 2026 |
| **About 1 in 4** | US adults who use Gemini, the second most used chatbot; Grok, Claude and Character.ai are each at about one in ten or fewer | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/) (independent research) | Feb 2026 |
| **About 4 in 10** | US adults who use chatbots to search for information | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/) (independent research) | Feb 2026 |
| **34%** | Weekly use of any generative AI system across Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US, up from 18% | [Reuters Institute, Generative AI and News Report 2025](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) (independent research) | Jun 5 to Jul 15, 2025 |
| **24%** | Weekly use of AI for getting information in the same six countries, up from 11%, now the top use case | [Reuters Institute](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) (independent research) | Jun to Jul 2025 |
| **9.5 billion** | Average monthly web visits to generative AI platforms worldwide, up 70% year over year | [Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Landscape](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | Jun 2025 to May 2026 |
| **About 53%** | ChatGPT's share of generative AI website visits, down from about 76% in June 2025 | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | May 2026 |
| **27 to 28%** | Gemini's share of generative AI website visits, up from under 9% | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | May 2026 |
| **Close to 9%** | Claude's share of generative AI website visits, up from about 2% | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | May 2026 |
| **About 26%** | ChatGPT responses that contain an ad | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | 2026 (published Jul 2026) |

**The audience is now split across assistants.** A year ago, optimizing for ChatGPT reached most AI users. Today Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok each hold audiences large enough to matter, and the engines studied so far cite different sources (see the citations section). That's why [generative engine optimization](/blog/what-is-generative-engine-optimization-geo-the-2026-definition-explained) has to be planned across engines, not for ChatGPT alone.

Two cautions on this table. Company figures use different units (weekly vs monthly users, one app vs a family of products), so don't rank them against each other. And there is no official consumer user count for Claude or Perplexity that we could open: we found none on Anthropic's site and no recent figure on Perplexity's own pages, so both are left out rather than filled with estimates.

## How many people see Google AI Overviews and AI Mode?

Google says AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode more than 1 billion. How often an Overview shows up depends on the query: in Pew's 2025 browsing panel it appeared on 18% of searches overall, but on 60% of searches that began with a question word, the kind of search buyers type when they compare options.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **2.5 billion+** | Monthly active users of AI Overviews | [Google I/O 2026 keynote](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/sundar-pichai-io-2026/) (company figure) | May 2026 |
| **1 billion+** | Monthly active users of AI Mode, since its global expansion in October 2025 | [Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) (company figure) | Jul 2026 |
| **"Billions"** | Clicks Google says it sends to websites every week through AI features in Search | [Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) (company figure) | Jul 2026 |
| **18%** | Google searches in Pew's panel of 900 US adults that produced an AI summary | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) (independent research, 68,879 searches) | Mar 2025 |
| **60% vs 8%** | Searches starting with who, what, when or why that produced an AI summary, vs one- or two-word searches | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) (independent research) | Mar 2025 |
| **About 50%** | Google searches that already have AI summaries per McKinsey's trend analysis, expected to pass 75% by 2028 (forecast) | [McKinsey, New front door to the internet](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search) (consultancy research) | 2025 (published Oct 2025) |
| **54%** | People in six countries who saw an AI-generated answer to one of their searches in the last week (61% in the US) | [Reuters Institute](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) (independent research) | Jun to Jul 2025 |
| **65%** | US adults who at least sometimes come across AI summaries in search results; 45% see them often or extremely often | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/01/americans-have-mixed-feelings-about-ai-summaries-in-search-results/) (independent research, 5,153 adults) | Aug 18 to 24, 2025 |

**The estimates of how often Overviews appear disagree because they count different searches.** Pew logged every search its panel ran, including short navigational ones that rarely trigger an Overview, and McKinsey doesn't publish the method behind its estimate. For a business the useful version is narrower: on the comparison and "best X for Y" questions your buyers ask, expect an AI answer above the links most of the time. Our [AI Overviews optimization guide](/blog/google-ai-overviews-optimization-in-2026-how-to-get-your-site-featured) covers what gets a page into that box.

## Do AI answers reduce clicks to websites?

Yes, for most queries. Independent and vendor studies agree that an AI Overview cuts clicks on the regular results below it, by more than half for the top result in Ahrefs' data. The 2026 data adds two nuances: click-through on AI Overview queries partly recovered in early 2026, and being cited inside the Overview more than doubles a brand's clicks.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **8% vs 15%** | Visits where users clicked a regular search result, with an AI summary vs without | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) (independent research) | Mar 2025 |
| **1%** | Visits to a results page with an AI summary where the user clicked a link inside the summary | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) (independent research) | Mar 2025 |
| **26% vs 16%** | Pages after which users ended their browsing session, with an AI summary vs traditional results only | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) (independent research) | Mar 2025 |
| **58%** | Lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview is present (300,000 keywords) | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/) (vendor study) | Dec 2025 |
| **2.4% vs 3.8%** | Organic click-through rate on queries with an AI Overview vs without; the AI Overview figure climbed from a 1.3% floor in December 2025 | [Seer Interactive](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update) (vendor study, 53 brands, 5.47M queries) | Feb 2026 |
| **+120%** | Organic clicks per impression when the brand is cited in the AI Overview vs not cited (still 38% below queries with no Overview, for informational queries) | [Seer Interactive](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update) (vendor study) | Jan 2025 to Feb 2026 |
| **33%** | Drop in Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 news sites worldwide (38% in the US) | [Chartbeat data, reported in the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary) | Nov 2024 to Nov 2025 |
| **43%** | Drop in search engine traffic news publishers expect over the next three years | [Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary) (independent research) | 2026 |
| **About 88%** | Google's share of referral traffic seen by Cloudflare, still the dominant gateway | [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) (network data) | 2026 (published Jul 2026) |
| **Up to 40%** | Decline in human traffic in some of the most heavily crawled site categories, in less than a year | [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) (network data) | 2026 (published Jul 2026) |
| **33% vs 28%** | People who always or often click links in AI search answers vs those who rarely or never do (six countries) | [Reuters Institute](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) (independent research, self-reported) | Jun to Jul 2025 |
| **80%** | Consumers who rely on "zero-click" results in at least 40% of their searches; Bain estimates this cuts organic web traffic by 15% to 25% | [Bain and Dynata survey, n=1,117](https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/) (consultancy research) | Dec 2024 (older) |

**Google disputes the aggregate picture.** In August 2025 it wrote that total organic click volume from Search to websites "has been relatively stable year-over-year" and that click quality rose, without publishing the underlying numbers ([Google, AI in Search: driving more queries and higher quality clicks, 2025](https://blog.google/products/search/ai-search-driving-more-queries-higher-quality-clicks/)). Both can be true at once: Google can send a similar number of clicks while they shift away from sites whose answer now sits in the Overview.

The practical reading: a page-one ranking is worth less than it was, and a citation inside the AI answer is worth more. Seer's split is the clearest evidence that the second is now the game.

## How much traffic do AI assistants send to websites?

Still a small slice of total traffic, but it is growing fast and it converts. Similarweb counts 770.7 million AI referral visits a month worldwide, more than double a year earlier. On US retail sites, Adobe measured AI-referred visitors converting better than other traffic in 2026, a reversal from a year before.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **770.7 million** | Average monthly referral visits from AI platforms worldwide (desktop and mobile web), up 117.4% | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/ai-referral-traffic-by-industry/) (vendor study) | Jun 2025 to May 2026 |
| **46.8 million** | Average monthly AI referral visits to marketplaces, the largest industry, up 237.3% | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/ai-referral-traffic-by-industry/) (vendor study) | Jun 2025 to May 2026 |
| **62 to 63%** | ChatGPT referral visits landing on homepages after its May 2026 update made brand names clickable, up from 26 to 29% | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | May 2026 |
| **+693%** | Year-over-year growth in traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites over the holiday season | [Adobe Digital Insights](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-driven-traffic-surges-across-industries) (vendor study, over 1 trillion visits) | Nov to Dec 2025 |
| **+539%, +266%, +120%** | Same holiday growth for travel, financial services, and tech and software sites | [Adobe Digital Insights](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-driven-traffic-surges-across-industries) (vendor study) | Nov to Dec 2025 |
| **+393%** | Year-over-year growth in AI traffic to US retail sites in the first quarter | [Adobe Digital Insights](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable) (vendor study) | Jan to Mar 2026 |
| **42% better** | Conversion of AI traffic vs non-AI traffic on US retail sites; in March 2025 it converted 38% worse | [Adobe Digital Insights](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable) (vendor study) | Mar 2026 |
| **48% longer** | Time on site for AI-referred retail visitors vs non-AI traffic, with 13% more pages per visit | [Adobe Digital Insights](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable) (vendor study) | Mar 2026 |
| **4.4x** | Value of the average AI search visitor vs the average traditional organic visitor, based on conversion rate | [Semrush](https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/) (vendor study) | 2025 |
| **0.25%** | Share of an average site's total traffic that came from AI assistants | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-increase/) (vendor study) | 2025 (published Jun 2025) |
| **About 21% vs about 10x** | Drop in the average site's search traffic over a year vs growth in its AI traffic | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-increase/) (vendor study) | 2025 (published Jun 2025) |

**The homepage shift is the number most teams miss.** When ChatGPT names a brand and links the name, the visitor usually lands on your homepage, not on the article that earned the mention. If your homepage doesn't answer "what is this and who is it for" in the first screen, that traffic leaks.

AI referrals are also easy to undercount: some arrive without a referrer, and default analytics channels mix the rest in with ordinary referral traffic. Our free [GA4 AI traffic regex generator](/tools/ai-referral-regex) builds the channel filter that separates ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot visits from the rest.

## Which sources do AI assistants cite?

Community and reference sites dominate: Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia sit at or near the top in each of the large citation studies below. Ranking well on Google helps less than it used to, and the mix moves fast: in 2025, ChatGPT's Reddit citations fell from about 60% of responses to about 10% within weeks.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **37.9%** | URLs cited in AI Overviews that also rank in Google's top 10 (863,000 keyword results, 4 million cited URLs); about 76% in July 2025 | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-citations-top-10/) (vendor study) | Published Mar 2026 |
| **18%** | AI Overview citations from "non-ranking" pages (outside Google's top 100) that come from YouTube | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-citations-top-10/) (vendor study) | Published Mar 2026 |
| **About 0.737** | Correlation between YouTube mentions and a brand's AI visibility, the strongest factor across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews (75,000 brands) | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations/) (vendor study) | 2025 (published Dec 2025) |
| **0.66 to 0.71** | Correlation between branded web mentions and AI visibility | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations/) (vendor study) | 2025 (published Dec 2025) |
| **About 0.194** | Correlation between a site's number of pages and its AI visibility ("almost no relationship") | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visibility-correlations/) (vendor study) | 2025 (published Dec 2025) |
| **25.7%** | How much fresher URLs cited by AI assistants are than URLs in organic results (average age 1,064 vs 1,432 days, 17 million citations) | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/do-ai-assistants-prefer-to-cite-fresh-content/) (vendor study) | 2025 (published Jul 2025) |
| **15%** | Share of sources listed in Google AI summaries that were Wikipedia, YouTube or Reddit combined | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears/) (independent research) | Mar 2025 |
| **#1 or #2** | Reddit's rank among the most-cited domains on every engine tested: ChatGPT, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews (30 million sources, US) | [Peec AI](https://peec.ai/blog/top-domains-cited-by-ai-search-analysis-based-on-30m-sources) (vendor study) | Published Mar 2026 |
| **About 60% to about 10%** | ChatGPT responses citing Reddit in early August 2025 vs mid-September 2025 (230,000 prompts tracked weekly) | [Semrush](https://www.semrush.com/blog/most-cited-domains-ai/) (vendor study) | Jul 14 to Oct 12, 2025 |
| **7.8%** | Wikipedia's share of all ChatGPT citations, its top source in a 680 million citation dataset | [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/ai-platform-citation-patterns) (vendor study) | Aug 2024 to Jun 2025 (older) |
| **6.6%** | Reddit's share of all Perplexity citations, its top source in the same dataset | [Profound](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/ai-platform-citation-patterns) (vendor study) | Aug 2024 to Jun 2025 (older) |
| **Almost 90%** | Pages cited by ChatGPT search that rank in position 21 or lower in Google for related queries | [Semrush](https://www.semrush.com/blog/ai-search-seo-traffic-study/) (vendor study) | 2025 |
| **About 6.8%** | US ChatGPT prompts whose answer includes a citation, up from about 1.6% in June 2025 | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/) (vendor study) | May 2026 |
| **22.6%** | ChatGPT travel answers that include web citations, the highest of any industry measured (US, desktop) | [Similarweb](https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/ai-referral-traffic-by-industry/) (vendor study) | May 2026 |
| **About 6 words, then about 12** | Average length of the background searches ("fan-outs") ChatGPT runs per prompt, October 2025 vs January 2026 (20 million fan-outs) | [Peec AI](https://peec.ai/blog/country-analysis-20-million-search-qfos) (vendor study) | Oct 2025 to Jan 2026 |
| **5 to 10%** | Share of the sources AI search references that are a brand's own sites, in many cases | [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search) (consultancy research) | 2025 (published Oct 2025) |

**Google rank is no longer a proxy for AI citation.** The two Ahrefs and Semrush findings point the same way: most cited pages are not the pages that win the classic top 10. That's why a brand can [rank first on Google while ChatGPT ignores it](/blog/you-rank-1-on-google-but-chatgpt-ignores-you-why-and-the-fix-2026).

**Your own site is the smaller half of the picture.** Mentions on YouTube and across the web correlate with AI visibility far more than the size of your site does, and Reddit is among the most-cited domains on every engine Peec AI tested. The off-site side of that work is covered in [how to get your brand mentioned in AI answers](/blog/how-to-get-your-brand-mentioned-in-ai-answers-2026-playbook), and Perplexity's citation habits in [how to show up as a source in Perplexity](/blog/how-to-show-up-as-a-source-in-perplexity-answers-2026).

The Profound figures predate the September 2025 shift Semrush recorded, so treat them as the 2024 to mid-2025 baseline, not today's mix. Citation shares are also averages across many prompts; your category can look very different, as the travel figure shows. Terms such as query fan-out and grounding are defined in our [GEO glossary](/glossary).

## How much do AI crawlers crawl, and what do they send back?

A lot, and little. Cloudflare now sees more crawler requests for AI training than for anything else, while AI platforms send back far fewer visits per page crawled than Google does. Crawling done live when a user asks a chatbot a question grew more than 15-fold in 2025, and that retrieval step decides who gets cited.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **52%** | Crawler requests made for AI training, up from 22% in spring 2025 | [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) (network data) | Jun 2026 |
| **Over 36%** | Crawler activity from mixed-use bots that blend search, agent use and training, so site owners can't tell the purpose | [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) (network data) | 2026 (published Jul 2026) |
| **More than 50%** | Internet traffic that is non-human, a threshold Cloudflare says agent traffic crossed for the first time this year | [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/) (network data) | 2026 (published Jul 2026) |
| **4.2% vs 4.5%** | Share of HTML requests from all AI bots combined vs from Googlebot alone | [Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/) (network data) | Jan 1 to Dec 2, 2025 |
| **Over 15x** | Growth in AI "user action" crawling (pages fetched in response to a user's question) during 2025 | [Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/) (network data) | 2025 |
| **About 7.5%** | OpenAI GPTBot's share of Verified Bot traffic, second to Googlebot's 28%+ | [Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/) (network data) | 2025 |
| **About 25,000:1 to 100,000:1** | Anthropic's crawl-to-refer ratio (pages crawled per visit sent) after May 2025, the highest of the leading AI and search platforms | [Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/) (network data) | Jun to Dec 2025 |
| **Below 200:1** | Perplexity's peak crawl-to-refer ratio from September 2025; it had the lowest ratios of the major AI platforms | [Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review](https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2025-year-in-review/) (network data) | Sep to Dec 2025 |
| **Nearly 80%** | Share of AI bot activity driven by training, up from 72% a year earlier | [Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap](https://blog.cloudflare.com/crawlers-click-ai-bots-training/) (network data) | Jul 2025 |
| **1 million+** | Cloudflare customers who turned on one-click AI crawler blocking; since July 1, 2025 every new domain is asked whether to allow AI crawlers | [Cloudflare press release](https://www.cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-just-changed-how-ai-crawlers-scrape-the-internet-at-large/) (company figure) | Jul 2025 |
| **None** | Major AI crawlers that rendered JavaScript in Vercel's tests; Gemini (via Googlebot) and AppleBot do render | [Vercel, The rise of the AI crawler](https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler) (network data) | Dec 2024 (older) |
| **569 million and 370 million** | Monthly fetches by OpenAI's GPTBot and Anthropic's Claude crawler across Vercel's network | [Vercel](https://vercel.com/blog/the-rise-of-the-ai-crawler) (network data) | Dec 2024 (older) |

**Blocking is easy to do by accident.** With a default prompt for new domains and a one-click switch, a site can block AI crawlers without anyone on the marketing team knowing. A blocked or JavaScript-only page can't be fetched at answer time, so it can't be cited, however good it is. Our free [AI crawler check](/tools/ai-crawler-check) fetches your page as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot and shows what each one gets; the [robots.txt AI rules builder](/tools/robots-txt-ai-rules) writes the rules if you want to allow answer bots while blocking training bots. Which bot does what is in our [list of AI crawler user agents](/ai-crawlers).

The Vercel test is from late 2024. It is still the most detailed public test of AI crawler rendering we found, but crawler behavior changes, so treat "doesn't render JavaScript" as the safe assumption to design for rather than a permanent fact.

## What makes content more likely to be cited?

The strongest controlled evidence is still the 2024 GEO paper from Princeton and collaborators: adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a source's visibility in AI answers by 30 to 40%, while keyword stuffing did not help. Vendor correlation studies add that off-site mentions and freshness matter more than page count.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Up to 40%** | Visibility boost in generative engine responses from GEO methods, tested on a 10,000-query benchmark | [Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735) (peer-reviewed paper) | 2024 (older) |
| **30 to 40%** | Relative improvement from the top three methods, Cite Sources, Quotation Addition and Statistics Addition, on the paper's position-adjusted word count metric (15 to 30% on its subjective impression metric) | [Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024](https://arxiv.org/html/2311.09735v3) (peer-reviewed paper) | 2024 (older) |
| **Up to 37%** | Visibility improvement when the same methods were tested on Perplexity.ai, a live engine | [Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024](https://arxiv.org/html/2311.09735v3) (peer-reviewed paper) | 2024 (older) |
| **+115.1% vs -30.3%** | Visibility change from Cite Sources for websites ranked fifth in search results vs websites ranked first | [Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024](https://arxiv.org/html/2311.09735v3) (peer-reviewed paper) | 2024 (older) |

**The lower-ranked site gains the most.** In the paper, sourcing helped the fifth-ranked page far more than the first-ranked one, which is the part of GEO that matters for smaller brands: a better-sourced page can be quoted over a bigger competitor's.

Read the paper's numbers as direction, not a forecast. The experiments used a research engine built on GPT-3.5 plus one live engine (Perplexity.ai), and today's assistants retrieve and rank sources differently. What has held up in later vendor data is the pattern: sourced numbers, quotable answer blocks and recent updates. We cover the page structure in [the content AI assistants actually cite](/blog/the-content-ai-assistants-actually-cite-page-structure-that-wins-in-2026), and the full routine in [how to get cited by ChatGPT](/blog/how-to-get-cited-by-chatgpt-in-2026-a-practical-playbook).

## Do people trust AI answers?

Partly. About half of the people who see AI search answers say they trust them at least somewhat, but very few trust them a lot, and many check important answers elsewhere. Trust is concentrated in a few brands, with ChatGPT ahead. Businesses are behind their customers: few track how AI search describes them.

| Statistic | What it measures | Source | Data from |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **53% vs 6%** | US adults who have seen AI summaries and trust the information at least somewhat vs a lot; 46% have not much or no trust | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/01/americans-have-mixed-feelings-about-ai-summaries-in-search-results/) (independent research) | Aug 2025 |
| **1 in 5** | US adults who have seen AI summaries and find them extremely or very useful (52% somewhat useful) | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/01/americans-have-mixed-feelings-about-ai-summaries-in-search-results/) (independent research) | Aug 2025 |
| **50%** | People in six countries who encounter AI search answers and say they trust them | [Reuters Institute](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) (independent research) | Jun to Jul 2025 |
| **29%** | People who say they trust ChatGPT, ahead of Gemini (18%), Copilot (12%) and Meta AI (12%), six-country average | [Reuters Institute](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/generative-ai-and-news-report-2025-how-people-think-about-ais-role-journalism-and-society) (independent research) | Jun to Jul 2025 |
| **10%** | People who use AI chatbots for news each week across 48 markets, up from 7%; 16% of under-35s | [Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary) (independent research) | 2026 |
| **44% vs 31%** | AI-powered search users who call it their primary and preferred source of insight vs those who pick traditional search | [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search) (consultancy research) | 2025 (published Oct 2025) |
| **Half** | Consumers in McKinsey's survey who now intentionally seek out AI-powered search engines (n=1,927) | [McKinsey AI Discovery Survey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search) (consultancy research) | 2025 (published Oct 2025) |
| **16%** | Brands that systematically track their AI search performance | [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search) (consultancy research) | 2025 (published Oct 2025) |
| **$750 billion** | US revenue McKinsey projects will funnel through AI-powered search by 2028 (forecast) | [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/new-front-door-to-the-internet-winning-in-the-age-of-ai-search) (consultancy research) | 2025 (published Oct 2025) |
| **39% and 85%** | US consumers who have used AI for online shopping, and the share of them who say it improved their experience (5,000+ respondents) | [Adobe consumer survey](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable) (vendor study) | 2026 (published Apr 2026) |
| **66%** | Adobe survey respondents who believe AI tools provide accurate results | [Adobe consumer survey](https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-traffic-surge-retail-sites-not-machine-readable) (vendor study) | 2026 (published Apr 2026) |
| **68%** | LLM users who use them to research and summarize information (48% for news and weather, 42% for shopping recommendations) | [Bain and Dynata survey, n=1,117](https://www.bain.com/insights/goodbye-clicks-hello-ai-zero-click-search-redefines-marketing/) (consultancy research) | Dec 2024 (older) |

**Moderate trust is enough to shape a shortlist.** People don't need to trust an AI answer completely for it to decide which three brands they look at next. The gap that stands out is on the business side: McKinsey's finding that few brands track AI search suggests most companies don't systematically check what these assistants say about them.

## What do these numbers mean for your brand?

Five conclusions hold across the independent and vendor data, even where individual numbers disagree.

1.  **Track more than one assistant.** ChatGPT's share is falling as Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Grok grow, and the engines studied so far cite different sources. One engine is no longer a sample of the market.
2.  **Aim for the citation, not just the ranking.** Clicks on regular results shrink under an AI Overview, while cited brands gain. A page built to be quoted (a direct answer, a table, sourced numbers) is the asset that holds its value.
3.  **Earn mentions where AI looks.** YouTube and web mentions correlate with AI visibility far more than the size of your own site, and Reddit ranks among the most-cited domains on every engine Peec AI tested.
4.  **Make sure the bots can read you.** AI crawling for live answers grew more than 15-fold in 2025, and a blocked or JavaScript-only page can't be fetched when a buyer asks.
5.  **Measure your own baseline, not an industry average.** Citation rates vary several-fold by category, and answers vary run to run, so track your buyer questions over time. Our post on [how accurate AI visibility trackers are](/blog/how-accurate-are-ai-visibility-trackers-what-the-numbers-really-mean-2026) explains how to read that data.

If you want that baseline for your own brand, GEOHATS (our product) asks your buyers' questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok and shows which pages get cited instead of you: see [AI visibility tracking](/features/ai-visibility-tracking).

## How we sourced this page

-   **Primary sources only.** Every figure links to the organization that collected the data: the company's own announcement or filing, the research organization's report, or the vendor's own study page. Where a number belongs to someone else (Chartbeat's traffic data in the Reuters Institute report), we name both.
-   **Opened on publication day.** Each source was opened and the figure re-read on October 24, 2026. Figures are quoted as the source states them, including words like "about" and "more than".
-   **Dates.** "Data from" is when the data was collected where the source says so; otherwise it is the publication date, marked "published". Data collected before 2025 is marked "older" and kept only where nothing newer exists.
-   **Labels.** Company figure, independent research, peer-reviewed paper, consultancy research, vendor study or network data, as described at the top. Forecasts are marked as forecasts.
-   **What we left out.** Perplexity query counts and Claude consumer user counts (no figure on the companies' own pages that we could open), the "1.2 billion weekly users" figure attributed to OpenAI's DevDay 2026 recap (the page failed to load for us on October 24, so we used OpenAI's August 2026 figure instead), a widely repeated news "zero-click" percentage attributed to Similarweb (we found it only in press coverage, not on a Similarweb page), and an AI referral conversion rate attributed to Similarweb that does not appear on the Similarweb pages we opened. Seer Interactive's earlier 2025 click-through figures are superseded by its April 2026 update.

When a source publishes a newer figure, we replace the row and change the date at the top of the page.

## FAQ: AI search statistics

### How many people use ChatGPT in 2026?

OpenAI says ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly active users (August 31, 2026), up from 700 million when it published its usage study in September 2025. In the US, Pew found 44% of adults have used ChatGPT (February 2026), up from 34% a year earlier.

### How many people use Google AI Overviews and AI Mode?

Google said in May 2026 that AI Overviews have over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and in July 2026 that AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly active users since its global expansion in October 2025. The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users.

### Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites?

Mostly yes. Pew found users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits with an AI summary vs 15% without (March 2025), and Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears (December 2025). Brands cited inside the Overview do better: Seer Interactive found 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands. Google said in August 2025 that total organic click volume has been relatively stable.

### How much traffic do AI assistants send to websites?

Similarweb counts 770.7 million AI referral visits a month worldwide between June 2025 and May 2026, up 117.4% year over year. It is still a small share of most sites' traffic (0.25% on average in Ahrefs' mid-2025 data), but it converts well: Adobe found AI traffic to US retail sites converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026.

### Which websites do AI assistants cite the most?

Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia lead most large studies. Peec AI found Reddit was the #1 or #2 most-cited domain on every engine it tested (March 2026), and Pew found Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit made up 15% of sources in Google's AI summaries. The mix shifts quickly: Semrush saw ChatGPT's Reddit citations fall from about 60% of responses to about 10% within weeks in 2025.

### If I rank first on Google, will AI assistants cite me?

Not necessarily. Ahrefs found 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google's top 10 (March 2026), down from about 76% in July 2025, and Semrush found almost 90% of pages cited by ChatGPT search rank in position 21 or lower for related queries.

### What makes content more likely to be cited by AI?

In the GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024), adding citations, quotations and statistics improved a source's visibility by 30 to 40%, and keyword stuffing did not help. Ahrefs data adds that AI assistants cite fresher pages than Google's organic results and that YouTube and web mentions correlate with AI visibility far more than a site's page count.

### Are AI crawlers blocked by default?

On Cloudflare, every new domain has been asked whether to allow AI crawlers since July 1, 2025, and more than 1 million customers turned on one-click AI crawler blocking. A site can block AI bots without the marketing team knowing, so check your robots.txt and firewall settings, and confirm your pages work without JavaScript.

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Source: https://geohats.com/blog/ai-search-statistics-2026 · More guides: https://geohats.com/blog · About GEOHATS: https://geohats.com