The numbers
AI search statistics for 2026, with sources.
The short answer
In 2026, Google’s AI Overviews reach over 2.5 billion people a month and ChatGPT 900 million a week. 68% of US Google searches now end without a click. And only 12% of the pages ChatGPT cites rank in Google’s top 10 for the same question. 32 numbers below, one line each, every one read at its source.
Published September 9, 2026 · every figure retrieved September 8, 2026 · refreshed monthly, next October 2026 · by Thibault Genon-Catalot, founder
How to read this page
Where do these AI search statistics come from?
Each line is written to be quoted alone: the figure, who measured it, and when. The link under it goes to the original study, not to a roundup. Where a source gives its sample size, it is in the note. Where a famous number could not be verified at its source, it is not here, and the FAQ says which ones. Statistics with sources are also the format the engines quote most: the Princeton GEO research measured a 30 to 40% visibility gain from adding them, which is why this page exists in the first place.
The reach
How many people use AI search in 2026?
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ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers, per OpenAI's February 2026 announcement as reported by TechCrunch.
OpenAI (via TechCrunch), February 2026 ↗ -
Google's AI Overviews now have over 2.5 billion monthly active users, per Sundar Pichai's Google I/O keynote in May 2026.
Google, May 2026 ↗ -
Google's AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users within a year of its global rollout, per Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings remarks.
Google / Alphabet, July 2026 ↗ -
The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users tripling in a year, per Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings remarks.
Google / Alphabet, July 2026 ↗ -
About half of US adults (49%) now use AI chatbots, 44% have used ChatGPT, and searching for information is the top use at 42%, per Pew Research Center's June 2026 report.
Pew Research Center, June 2026 ↗ -
Generative AI platforms drew 9.5 billion visits a month worldwide between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year on year, while ChatGPT's share of those visits fell from about 76% to roughly 53%, per Similarweb.
Similarweb, July 2026 ↗
The behaviour shift
What do AI answers do to clicks and traffic?
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68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024, per Rand Fishkin's SparkToro analysis of Similarweb clickstream data.
SparkToro (Similarweb data), June 2026 ↗ -
Google users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared versus 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the AI summary only 1% of the time, per Pew Research Center's July 2025 study.
Pew Research Center, July 2025 ↗ -
In February 2026 organic CTR was 2.36% when an AI Overview showed versus 3.82% when it did not, and brands cited inside the AI Overview earned 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands, per Seer Interactive's 2026 update.
Seer Interactive, April 2026 ↗ -
On queries with AI Overviews, organic CTR fell 61% (from 1.76% to 0.61%) and paid CTR fell 68% between June 2024 and September 2025, per Seer Interactive.
Seer Interactive, November 2025 ↗ -
AI Overviews appeared on 6.49% of tracked US keywords in January 2025, peaked at 24.61% in July 2025 and settled at 15.69% in November 2025, per Semrush's study of 10 million+ keywords.
Semrush, November 2025 ↗ -
The share of commercial-intent searches showing an AI Overview grew 71% between November 2025 and April 2026, while transactional queries saw a 5% decline, per Semrush's study of 600,000+ US keywords.
Semrush, July 2026 ↗ -
AI platforms sent an average of 770.7 million referral visits a month to websites between June 2025 and May 2026, more than double the prior year (+117.4%), with ChatGPT accounting for over 80% of AI referrals to the top 1,000 domains, per Similarweb.
Similarweb, September 2026 ↗ -
The average AI-search visitor is worth 4.4 times an average organic-search visitor on conversion rate, and AI search visits could surpass traditional search visits by early 2028, per Semrush's July 2025 study.
Semrush, July 2025 ↗ -
Traffic from AI sources to US retail sites grew 393% year on year in Q1 2026 and converted 42% better than other traffic in March 2026, with revenue per visit 37% higher, per Adobe Digital Insights as reported by TechCrunch.
Adobe Digital Insights (via TechCrunch), April 2026 ↗
The sources
What do the engines actually cite?
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Only 12% of the URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot rank in Google's top 10 for the same prompt, versus 28.6% for Perplexity and 76% for AI Overviews, per Ahrefs' August 2025 study of 15,000 long-tail queries.
Ahrefs, August 2025 ↗ -
86% of the top 50 most-mentioned sources are not shared across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and only 7 websites appear in all three top-50 lists, per Ahrefs' June 2025 analysis.
Ahrefs, June 2025 ↗ -
ChatGPT cites an average of 15 sources per response while Gemini cites about 3, and only 36 brands kept visibility across every AI platform, per Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index of 126 million US prompts.
Semrush, June 2026 ↗ -
Google AI Mode answers cite about seven unique domains versus three for AI Overviews, and only about 35% of AI Mode's cited URLs (54% of domains) overlap with Google's top 10 organic results, per Semrush's July 2025 study of 5,000 keywords.
Semrush, July 2025 ↗ -
Wikipedia makes up 47.9% of ChatGPT's top-10 cited sources, Reddit 46.7% of Perplexity's, and YouTube 18.8% of Google AI Overviews', per Profound's analysis of 680 million citations (August 2024 to June 2025).
Profound, June 2025 ↗ -
Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn are the three most-cited domains across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, with Wikipedia and Forbes completing the top five, per Peec AI's September 2026 analysis of 30 million cited sources.
Peec AI, September 2026 ↗ -
Listicles are the most-cited page type in ChatGPT answers at 43.8% of 26,283 source URLs, yet ChatGPT cut listicle citations by 30% between December 2025 and January 2026, per Kevin Indig's Growth Memo.
Kevin Indig / Growth Memo, August 2026 ↗ -
62% of AI citations do not lead to a brand mention in the answer, per Semrush's June 2026 'ghost citations' study with Growth Memo.
Semrush (with Growth Memo), June 2026 ↗
The buyers
Are B2B buyers using AI to choose vendors?
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In 2025, 61% of B2B purchase influencers said their organisation has or will use a private genAI engine to support purchasing, and 30% of buyers saw genAI tools as a meaningful interaction at the final commit stage, versus 17% for product experts, per Forrester's 2026 B2B predictions.
Forrester, October 2025 ↗ -
Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 says genAI searches are now the starting point for B2B buyers, in buying decisions that involve 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers on average.
Forrester, January 2026 ↗
The market
Who is budgeting for AI search, and who can measure it?
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69% of search professionals now have budget allocated to AI search optimisation, up from 38% a year earlier, and 61% say that investment grew during 2026, per SEOFOMO's 2026 State of AI Search Optimization survey.
SEOFOMO, August/September 2026 ↗ -
87% of content marketers plan to increase content budgets in 2026 and one in four say large language models are now the primary audience for most of their content (32% among enterprises), per Clutch and Conductor's 2026 State of Content survey.
Clutch / Conductor, February 2026 ↗ -
45% of marketing leaders say they cannot accurately measure their brand's visibility in AI-generated answers and only 9% have the tools to track all relevant metrics, per Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index.
Semrush, June 2026 ↗
The evidence
What does the research say actually works?
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Generative engine optimisation can boost a source's visibility in AI answers by up to 40%, per the Princeton-led GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).
Princeton University et al. (arXiv 2311.09735), November 2023 ↗ -
Adding citations, quotations and statistics to a page improved its visibility in AI answers by 30-40% on the Position-Adjusted Word Count metric and 15-30% on Subjective Impression, per the Princeton GEO paper.
Princeton University et al. (arXiv 2311.09735), November 2023 ↗ -
The Cite Sources method raised visibility 115.1% for websites ranked fifth in search while the top-ranked site lost 30.3% on average, per the Princeton GEO paper, which concludes GEO helps lower-ranked sites most.
Princeton University et al. (arXiv 2311.09735), November 2023 ↗ -
On the real-world engine Perplexity.ai, GEO methods improved visibility by up to 37% while classic keyword stuffing performed 10% worse than the unoptimised baseline, per the Princeton GEO paper.
Princeton University et al. (arXiv 2311.09735), November 2023 ↗
Our own number
Where do we stand ourselves?
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NextChannel Studio was named 0 times out of 26 buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overview in the week of September 8, 2026, eight days after its first method pages went live, per its own weekly tracker.
NextChannel Studio share-of-answer tracker, September 2026 ↗
We publish that line because the method is only credible if it is applied to us first. The curve, whichever way it goes, is on the share-of-answer page, and the eight steps behind it are on /methodology. Why a brand that ranks well on Google can still be absent from AI answers is explained, with the mechanics, at /why-chatgpt-ignores-your-brand.
Questions
Fair questions about these numbers. Straight answers.
Can I quote these numbers?
Yes, that is what the page is for. Quote the sentence as written, with the source and the date that sit next to it, and link to the original study rather than to us. If you also link here, thank you, but the source deserves the credit.
Why do the click numbers disagree so much (Pew says 8%, Seer says 61%)?
They measure different things. Pew tracked 900 US adults and counted how often anyone clicked any result when an AI summary appeared (8% of visits). Seer measured click-through rate per impression on 3,119 commercial queries from 42 organisations, and reported the drop between two dates (61%). Ahrefs measured the top-ranking page only. Read the unit before comparing two figures, and quote the one whose unit matches your point.
How reliable are vendor studies like Semrush, Ahrefs or Similarweb?
Reliable for the direction, careful for the exact figure. They sell tools for the problem they measure, their samples are what their tools can see, and the numbers move every few months as Google and OpenAI change their products. We keep them because they are the only large-sample data that exists, we name the sample size where the source gives one, and we drop a figure when its source page disappears (see the next question).
Which famous numbers are NOT on this page, and why?
Five that circulate widely could not be verified at a primary source on the retrieval date, so they are out: Gartner's '25% drop in search volume by 2026' (the page is paywalled), the '89% of B2B buyers use AI' figure attributed to Forrester (not in any Forrester release we could open), Similarweb's '+157% ChatGPT referrals' (page removed), Adobe's May 2026 traffic figures (site unreachable on three tries) and the '48% of queries show an AI Overview' claim (no primary page found). If you can point us to the primary source, we will add them.
How often is this page refreshed?
Monthly. Each refresh re-opens every source, updates the figures that changed, removes the ones whose page vanished and adds new studies. The published date and the retrieval date at the top of the page are the audit trail. Next refresh: October 2026.
Where does your own 0 out of 26 come from?
From our tracker: 26 buyer questions in our own category (AI visibility audits, GEO agencies, the definitions), asked to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overview once a week each. NextChannel Studio has been named 0 times so far, 8 days after our first method pages went live. The whole curve, up or down, is published every week on the share-of-answer page.
Free, 2 minutes
Before you buy any audit: run one free check.
5 buyer questions, 2 AI engines, and you see who gets named instead of you. The verdict shows on the page, and a copy lands in your inbox.
Where to go next
The market numbers are above. Yours take 48 hours.
None of these statistics says whether the engines name your company. The $1,500 audit answers that on 50 to 70 of your buyers’ questions, 750 to 1,050 answers, with the sources behind them and what to fix first. What this work costs across the market is on /geo-pricing, and the three words everybody mixes up are sorted out at /aeo-vs-geo-vs-seo. If a free tool has already handed you a score out of 100, here is what that number measures and what it cannot tell you. Our own study of 615 AI answers, and what it says about measuring any of this once, is at /do-ai-answers-change-every-time.