Reference · Updated 2 September 2026 · Last verified 2 September 2026
AI Search Statistics 2026
56 numbers on AI search, and every one of them links to the study that produced it, with the publication date and the sample size. We don't cite roundups that cite other roundups. 45 of the 56 we read on the source's own page; the rest are marked and carry the report we took them from.
Built for people who have to attribute a figure by 5pm. Reporters, analysts, anyone writing a deck. Every row has a copy-citation button and a stable link.
The cheat sheet
The 10 numbers a reporter needs first
One line each. Click the row for the detail and the sample size.
| Figure | Claim | Source | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 68.01% | 68% of US Google searches end without a click | SparkToro, 9 June 2026 | |
| -58% | An AI Overview cuts the top result's click-through rate by 58% | Ahrefs, 4 February 2026 | |
| 8% | People click a result on 8% of searches with an AI summary, 15% without | Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 | |
| 2B+ | AI Overviews reach over 2 billion monthly users | Google, 23 July 2025 | |
| 1B+ | AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users | Google, 22 July 2026 | |
| 900M | ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users | OpenAI, 27 February 2026 | |
| 1.08% | AI referrals are 1.08% of all website traffic | Conductor, 6 July 2026 | |
| 4.4x | An AI search visitor is worth 4.4x a traditional organic visitor | Semrush, 21 July 2025 | |
| -60% | Small publishers lost 60% of search traffic, large ones 22% | Chartbeat, February 2026 | |
| 45% | 45% of consumers asked an AI tool for a local business recommendation, up from 6% | BrightLocal, 10 March 2026 |
Section A · Adoption
How many people use AI search
Google and OpenAI both count in billions now, and both publish their own numbers without an auditor. The survey data underneath is more sober: about half of US adults use a chatbot at all, and only one in six has made it their default way to search.
Figure 1 · Adoption
Share of US adults who have used each chatbot
ChatGPT alone reaches nearly half the adult population. Every other tool is a distant second.
Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026, 17 June 2026 · 5,119 US adults
2B+
AI Overviews reach over 2 billion monthly users
monthly users
Google says AI Overviews serve "over 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages" and drive "over 10% more queries globally for the types of queries that show them".
Google (Alphabet Q2 2025 earnings) · · Company disclosure, unaudited
1B+
AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users
monthly active users
"Since expanding AI Mode globally last October, we've surpassed 1 billion monthly active users." Search and Other revenue grew 17% year on year in the same quarter.
Google (Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings) · · Company disclosure, unaudited
100M+
AI Mode had 100 million monthly users a year earlier
monthly active users (US and India)
July 2025 baseline for the 1 billion figure above. That is roughly a 10x jump in 12 months, helped by a global rollout in October 2025.
Google (Alphabet Q2 2025 earnings) · · Company disclosure, unaudited
950M
Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users
monthly active users
Daily active users tripled in the last year. Google also says it is "now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search", a claim no outside party has audited.
Google (Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings) · · Company disclosure, unaudited
900M
ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users
weekly active users
Disclosed alongside a $110 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. 50 million paying subscribers. Prior milestones: 400 million (February 2025), 800 million (October 2025).
OpenAI, reported by TechCrunch · · Company disclosure
1B+
OpenAI says its models reach more than 1 billion active users
active users (all OpenAI models)
Exact wording: "Our models now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses." Note the phrasing. This is not the same metric as ChatGPT weekly active users, and OpenAI did not state a ChatGPT-only weekly figure.
OpenAI, reported by AFP via BNN Bloomberg · · Company disclosure
49%
About half of US adults use AI chatbots
of US adults
Up from a third in 2024. 24% use a chatbot daily (12% several times a day, 4% almost constantly). 51% say they never use one.
Pew Research Center · · 5,119 US adults, surveyed 17 to 23 February 2026
44%
44% of Americans have used ChatGPT, 6% have used Claude
of US adults have used ChatGPT
Gemini 24%, Copilot 17%, Meta AI 14%, Grok 8%, Claude 6%. ChatGPT use doubled from 18% in 2023. Adults under 50 are twice as likely to use ChatGPT as those 50 and over (57% vs 28%).
Pew Research Center · · 5,119 US adults, February 2026
60%
60% of Americans read the AI summary at the top of search results
of US adults
30% say they do not read them, 10% are unsure. Among chatbot users, 42% use a chatbot to search for information.
Pew Research Center · · 5,119 US adults, February 2026
16%
56% still default to a search engine, 16% default to a chatbot
mostly or always use a chatbot as their default search tool
76% of baby boomers and 55% of Gen X mostly or always use search engines. For millennials and Gen Z the figure is 42%. Top reasons for picking a chatbot: clarifying complex topics (53%), step-by-step instructions (47%), brainstorming (45%), quick factual answers (45%).
Bain & Company · · 1,500 consumers, Bain Generative AI Consumer Survey, September 2025
50%
Half of German internet users sometimes use an AI chat instead of a search engine
of German internet users
Among 16 to 29 year olds it is two thirds. 58% of Germans aged 16 and over use AI at all; 34% weekly, 15% daily. Among AI users, 71% use ChatGPT, 50% Gemini, 43% Copilot.
Bitkom Research · · About 1,000 people aged 16 and over in Germany, representative
Section B · Share
AI search market share
Two different questions hide under "market share". Share of chatbot traffic (Similarweb) tells you who is winning inside AI. Share of all search activity (Datos, StatCounter) tells you how small AI still is next to Google. Both are true at once.
Figure 2 · Market share
Share of gen-AI web visits, May 2026
ChatGPT lost 25 points of share in 12 months. Gemini and Claude took almost all of it.
Similarweb, AI Search Stats, 29 July 2026 · global clickstream panel
9.5B
AI platforms average 9.5 billion web visits a month
monthly visits, global
Up 70% year on year. 655 million unique visitors (+57%) and 4.4 billion app downloads (+58%) over the June 2025 to May 2026 window.
Similarweb · · Similarweb global panel, June 2025 to May 2026
34.8%
ChatGPT is used by 34.8% of US desktop AI users, Claude by 8.5%
of US desktop AI-tool users, March 2026
Gemini 16.06%, Claude 8.54%. EU and UK: ChatGPT 44.82%, Gemini 18.88%, Claude 9.61%. A panel measure of people, not a traffic-share measure, which is why it differs from the Similarweb figure above.
Datos, reported by PPC Land · · Desktop panel, March 2026
91.32%
Google holds 91.3% of global search engine share
of global search referrals, July 2026
Bing 4.46%, Yahoo 1.24%. StatCounter measures referrals from classic search engines only; chatbots are not in this denominator.
StatCounter Global Stats · · StatCounter tracking code on ~1.5 million sites
1st
Apple: Google searches in Safari fell in April 2025 for the first time in 22 years
decline in 22 years
Eddy Cue's testimony in the US v. Google trial, attributed to AI. Alphabet stock fell about 7.5% that day. Google replied it "continue[s] to see overall query growth in Search", including from Apple devices. Both statements are on the record; neither side published the numbers.
Apple (court testimony), reported by Search Engine Land · · Testimony, no dataset released
Section C · Clicks
Zero-click and AI Overviews
This is the section most people come for, and the one where the headline numbers fight each other. The fight is about definitions, not data. Section I explains which number answers which question.
Figure 3 · Zero-click
Share of US Google searches that end without a click
7.5 points in two years. The fastest rise in a decade of this series.
SparkToro on Similarweb clickstream data, June 2026 · 2026 = January to April
Figure 4 · AI Overview CTR
Click-through rate change when an AI Overview shows
The top result loses the most. Nobody on page one is spared.
Ahrefs, 4 February 2026 · 300,000 keywords, GSC desktop CTR, Dec 2023 vs Dec 2025
68.01%
68% of US Google searches end without a click
of US Google searches, January to April 2026
Up from 60.45% in 2024, 49% in 2019 and roughly 45% in 2016. A zero-click search here means no click to any website, including Google's own properties. The 7.5 point rise in two years is the fastest in a decade of this series.
SparkToro (Rand Fishkin) on Similarweb clickstream data, reported by Search Engine Land · · Similarweb US clickstream panel, desktop and mobile
59%
Zero-click: UK 62%, Germany 59%, France 57%
of German Google searches end without a click
The UK has the highest rate of the three because AI Overviews and other on-page features launched first in English-speaking markets; EU design rules leave Google less room to experiment.
SparkToro on Similarweb clickstream data · · Similarweb clickstream panels, UK, Germany, France
22.4%
Datos measures US zero-click at 22.4%, not 68%
of US desktop Google searches, March 2026
Down from 24.5% in December 2025. EU and UK: 19.6%. Desktop only, and Datos counts a click to a Google property as a click. Same month, same country, different definition, three times smaller. See "Why the numbers disagree" below.
Datos, reported by PPC Land · · Desktop panel, March 2026
-58%
An AI Overview cuts the top result's click-through rate by 58%
CTR for position 1 when an AI Overview shows
Position 1 CTR fell from 7.3% (December 2023) to 1.6% (December 2025) on keywords with an AI Overview. Position 2: -50.8%, position 3: -46.4%, position 5: -32.6%. The April 2025 version of the same study found -34.5%.
Ahrefs (Ryan Law) · · 300,000 keywords (150,000 with AIO, 150,000 without), Google Search Console desktop CTR
2.36%
Organic CTR on AI Overview queries bottomed at 0.61% and recovered to 2.36%
organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview, February 2026
3.19% in January 2025, 0.61% in September 2025, 2.36% in February 2026. Queries without an AI Overview went from 2.75% to 3.82%. Paid CTR on AI Overview queries rose from 14.64% to 16.21%.
Seer Interactive · · 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion organic and 296.9 million paid impressions, January 2025 to February 2026
+120%
Being cited inside the AI Overview earns 120% more clicks per impression
organic clicks per impression, cited vs not cited
Cited brand CTR 2.07%, uncited 0.94%, no AI Overview 3.35% (informational queries). Getting into the box beats ranking under it.
Seer Interactive · · Same dataset as above
36%
AI Overviews show on 36% of informational queries but only 5% of transactional ones
of informational queries show an AI Overview
Commercial 8%, transactional 5%. By query shape: comparison queries 95.4%, question queries 85.9%, "near me" queries 76.9%, single-word queries 27.3%.
Seer Interactive · · 5.47 million queries, January 2025 to February 2026
8%
People click a result on 8% of searches with an AI summary, 15% without
of visits with an AI summary led to a click on a traditional result
Only 1% of visits included a click on a link inside the summary. 26% of sessions ended right after an AI summary, against 16% without one. 18% of searches produced a summary in March 2025; the median summary was 67 words.
Pew Research Center · · 900 US adults, 68,879 unique Google searches, March 2025
25.11%
AI Overviews appeared on 25% of 21.9 million searches
of searches generated an AI Overview, autumn 2025
Healthcare 48.75%, Financials 25.79%, Utilities 25.4%, Consumer Staples 6.82%, Real Estate 4.48%.
Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report · · 21.9 million unique Google searches, 15 September to 12 October 2025
70%
70% of users say they get their answer from the AI overview without clicking
of users report zero-click results with AI overviews
46% of respondents use search-engine AI overviews. Self-reported behaviour, so it measures what people think they do, not what a clickstream records.
Bain & Company · · 1,500 consumers, September 2025
Section D · Referrals
AI referral traffic and what it is worth
AI sends about one visit in a hundred. Those visits convert far better than organic ones because the visitor has already done the comparing inside the chat. The share is small; the growth is measured in multiples rather than percentage points.
Figure 5 · AI referrals
AI referral traffic as a share of all sessions
Still a rounding error in volume. The value per visit is the story, not the share.
Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks, July 2026 · 13,770 domains, 3.3 billion sessions
1.08%
AI referrals are 1.08% of all website traffic
of website sessions from AI platforms
ChatGPT sends 87.4% of that AI referral traffic. Information Technology sites get 2.8%, Consumer Staples 1.9%, Utilities 0.35%, Communication Services 0.25%. Growing around 1% month on month.
Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report · · 13,770 enterprise domains, 3.3 billion sessions, 35.7 million AI sessions, May to September 2025
4.4x
An AI search visitor is worth 4.4x a traditional organic visitor
value per visit, AI search vs organic search
Based on conversion rate. Semrush also found ChatGPT cites pages that rank in organic positions 21 and beyond almost 90% of the time.
Semrush · · 500+ digital marketing and SEO topics, converted into search terms and prompts
2028
Projection: AI search visitors overtake traditional search visitors by early 2028
projected crossover year (marketing and SEO topics)
A projection, not a measurement. Semrush adds that if Google makes AI Mode the default, it "could happen much sooner".
Semrush · · Trend projection from the same study
+693.4%
AI traffic to US retail sites grew 693% over the 2025 holiday season
year on year, November to December 2025
Travel +539%, financial services +266%, tech and software +120%, media and entertainment +92%. AI referrals converted 31% better than other traffic and revenue per visit was up 254%. 47% of surveyed consumers said they trust AI results.
Adobe Analytics (Vivek Pandya) · · Over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites plus a survey of 1,000+ US consumers
+1,324%
AI-referred retail traffic is up 1,324% since October 2024
growth in AI-referred traffic to US retail sites, October 2024 to May 2026
+138% year on year in May 2026. AI visitors converted 54% better than non-AI visitors, spent 53% more time on site and viewed 23% more pages. A year earlier AI visitors converted at about half the rate of everyone else.
Adobe Analytics, reported by Digital Commerce 360 · · Over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites
6.8%
ChatGPT's US citation rate quadrupled to 6.8% in 11 months
of US ChatGPT responses cite a source, May 2026
1.6% in June 2025. Travel and hospitality 23%, automotive 20%, professional services under 4%. A ChatGPT session averages 15 minutes and 12 pages.
Similarweb · · Similarweb US panel
45%
45% of marketing leaders cannot measure their brand's visibility in AI answers
of marketing leaders
Only 9% have tools that track every relevant metric across platforms. ChatGPT cites about 15 sources per answer, Gemini about 3. AI traffic to US travel sites is up 2,215% since October 2024.
Semrush, 2026 AI Visibility Index · · 126 million US AI search prompts, January to April 2026, across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews
49%
49% of marketers say search traffic has fallen because of AI answers
of marketers report lower search traffic
58% say AI referral traffic shows higher intent. 37.7% plan to increase investment in AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude.
HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing · · 1,500+ marketers, global
Section E · Citations
Who gets cited
Ranking on Google and getting cited by an AI are mostly separate games. Forums and video win the citations. Newspapers with paywalls barely appear. And the biggest forum of all just learned how fast a citation share can vanish: Reddit lost 86% of its ChatGPT Search citations in four days in August 2026, and Google has been trimming it more slowly since October 2025.
Figure 6 · Reddit
Reddit's share of citations, before and after 14 August 2026
One platform change wiped out 86% of Reddit's ChatGPT citations in four days. Google trimmed it slowly.
Promptwatch, 18 August 2026 · 26 billion+ data points from the live ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode interfaces
21.1%
YouTube is cited in 21% of Google AI Overviews, Reddit in 18.5%
of US AI Overviews cite youtube.com
Reddit 18.5%, Facebook 10.7%, Google 7.1%, Instagram 5.8%, Quora 5.0%, Wikipedia 4.8%, Amazon 3.5%, TikTok 3.2%. Video and forums beat every publisher.
Ahrefs · · 3 million+ US queries
37.9%
Only 38% of AI Overview citations come from the top 10 results, down from 76%
of AIO-cited URLs also rank in the top 10
31.2% rank between 11 and 100; 31.0% rank beyond 100. In July 2025 about 76% came from the top 10. Ahrefs links the shift to query fan-out after AI Overviews moved to Gemini 3.
Ahrefs (Louise Linehan) · · 863,000 keyword SERPs, 4 million AI Overview URLs
12%
Only 12% of pages cited by AI assistants rank in Google's top 10 for the prompt
of AI-cited URLs rank in Google's top 10
ChatGPT 8.0%, Gemini 8.6%, Copilot 8.2%, Perplexity 28.6%. Ranking on Google and being cited by a chatbot are mostly different games.
Ahrefs · · 15,000 long-tail queries across Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity
25%+
Wikipedia and Reddit supply over 25% of ChatGPT's US citations; WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg and FT are not in the top 20
of US ChatGPT citations come from Wikipedia (13.15%) and Reddit (11.97%)
Reuters is #7 (2.27%). Forbes is #18 (1.38%), the only US business publication in the top 20. Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations swung from about 60% to about 10% inside two weeks in September 2025.
5W Public Relations, Citation Source Index · · About 600,000 citation events (Similarweb, January to February 2026) plus eight other datasets
-86.4%
Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations fell 86% in four days
Reddit share of ChatGPT Search citations, 3.83% (18 July to 7 August 2026) to 0.52% (14 to 17 August 2026)
A first step down on 8 August, when ChatGPT Search changed its query fan-out, then the cliff on 14 August. Promptwatch says the timing points to "a shift in ChatGPT's source selection" but "a data-collection issue cannot be ruled out". OpenAI told Yahoo Tech it "does not target or set a fixed level of visibility for individual websites" and that Reddit is still cited.
Promptwatch, reported by Search Engine Land · · 26 billion+ data points captured from the live ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode interfaces, 7 July to 17 August 2026; responses with at least one citation
-30.5%
Reddit's citation share slid 11% in AI Overviews and 31% in AI Mode over the same six weeks
Reddit share of Google AI Mode citations, 2.22% (7 to 14 July 2026) to 1.54% (10 to 17 August 2026)
AI Overviews: 2.37% to 2.10%, an 11.3% relative decline, with no single break point. Google's decline is gradual; ChatGPT's was a cliff. Nobody has published a cause for either.
Promptwatch · · Same dataset as the ChatGPT figure above
1.01%
Reddit's citation share across LLMs halved between October 2025 and January 2026
Reddit share of LLM citations, January 2026, down from 2.02% in October 2025
2.02% in October, 1.55% in November (-23%), 1.01% by January. At the same time the share of answers where Reddit was the only cited source rose 31%, and 70% of those sole-source answers were commercial or transactional prompts. Reddit is cited less often and more specifically.
Conductor · · 238,212 prompts where Reddit was cited, October 2025 to January 2026; 145,662 classified by intent
87.8%
88% of pages cited in AI Overviews mix AI and human writing
of AIO-cited pages are mixed AI and human content
3.6% read as pure AI, 8.6% as pure human. Correlation between AI share and citation order: 0.017, effectively zero. Ahrefs' own caveat: AI detectors deal in probabilities.
Ahrefs (Si Quan Ong) · · 1 million SERPs with AI Overviews, 500,000 URLs run through Ahrefs' AI content detector
Section F · Publishers
Publishers and the open web
Publishers lost a third of their Google traffic in 2025, and the smaller the site, the worse the cut. AI crawlers read thousands of pages for every reader they send back. The courts and the European Commission now have the file.
Figure 7 · Publishers
Google Search referral change by publisher size, year on year
The smaller the site, the bigger the hole. Brand and direct traffic are the survival tools.
Chartbeat, Navigating the New Traffic Landscape, Q1 2026 · Chartbeat network, billions of pageviews a month
Figure 8 · Crawl-to-refer
Pages crawled for every visitor sent back, July 2025
Every AI company takes far more than it sends. Google's ratio is the one the web was built on.
Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap, 29 August 2025 · log scale, live figures on Cloudflare Radar
-34%
Google Search pageviews to publishers fell 34% in 2025
Google Search referrals, December 2024 to December 2025
Google Discover fell 16%. Total network pageviews fell only 5.89% (7.64 billion to 7.19 billion a week on average), which Chartbeat calls normal fluctuation. Internal traffic rose from 38% to 41% of pageviews, dark social from 7% to 10%.
Chartbeat, "Navigating the New Traffic Landscape" · · Chartbeat network, billions of pageviews a month, data to 9 February 2026
-60%
Small publishers lost 60% of search traffic, large ones 22%
Google Search referrals, year on year, publishers with 1,000 to 10,000 daily pageviews
Medium publishers (10,000 to 100,000 daily pageviews) -47%, large (100,000+) -22%. ChatGPT referrals grew more than 200% year on year but chatbots still send under 1% of pageviews.
Chartbeat · · Chartbeat network, billions of pageviews a month
38,065:1
Anthropic crawled 38,065 pages for every visitor it referred; Google 5.4
pages crawled per referral, Anthropic, July 2025
OpenAI 1,091:1, Perplexity 194:1, Microsoft 40.7:1, Google 5.4:1. Anthropic's ratio was 286,930:1 in January 2025. 79% of AI crawler requests were for training, 17% for search, 3.2% for a user action. Ratios move every month; the live figures are on Cloudflare Radar.
Cloudflare · · Cloudflare network, HTML requests by user agent and referer, January to July 2025
2025-09-14
Rolling Stone owner Penske Media sued Google over AI Overviews
first major US publisher antitrust suit over AI Overviews
Google moved to dismiss in January 2026. Judge Amit Mehta, who ruled Google an illegal search monopolist in 2024, said at the hearing the situation "seems really unfair". No ruling on the merits yet.
TechCrunch; Search Engine Journal · · Court filing
EU
European publishers filed an antitrust complaint over AI Overviews and AI Mode
formal complaint to the European Commission
The European Publishers Council alleges Google uses journalism without authorisation, without a working opt-out and without payment, while displacing the traffic that funds it. It sits alongside the Commission's own investigation announced 9 December 2025.
European Publishers Council · · Regulatory filing
$805M
Reddit told investors search referrals were "choppy" and logged-out traffic "volatile"
Reddit Q2 2026 revenue, up 61% year on year, while search referrals wobbled
Prepared remarks: "Search referrals were choppy in the quarter, and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter." On the Q&A: "external search is volatile, particularly logged-out web, but that's not where our business lives." Reddit reaches "more than 130 million" people daily. Q2 2026 is the last quarter Reddit reports logged-in versus logged-out users. The most-cited site in AI answers is the one warning about search traffic.
Reddit, Inc., Q2 2026 earnings call transcript · · Company disclosure; call transcript
Section G · Buyers
B2B buyers and local search
Buyers ask the AI first and then check. B2B buyers validate what the chatbot said with a sales rep. Consumers verify a local recommendation against reviews before they call. Being citable gets you into the conversation; being reviewable closes it.
94%
94% of business buyers used AI in their last purchase
of B2B buyers used AI during the buying process
GenAI searches are now the starting point for B2B buyers, per Forrester. The typical decision involves 13 internal stakeholders and 9 external influencers. More than 60% of buyers use a trial, rising to 78% on purchases of $10 million or more.
Forrester, The State of Business Buying 2026 · · Forrester Buyers' Journey Survey, about 18,000 business buyers worldwide
69%
45% of B2B buyers used GenAI, and 69% want a sales rep to validate what it said
of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep
Buyers used an average of seven information sources. 67% prefer a rep-free experience and 70% a fully digital one. 51% say they are more likely to get misleading information from GenAI, 49% say from a sales rep.
Gartner · · 645 B2B buyers, August to September 2025
45%
45% of consumers asked an AI tool for a local business recommendation, up from 6%
of US consumers used AI for local business recommendations in the past year
6% a year earlier. 31% do it at least monthly. ChatGPT 31%, Google AI Mode 23% among active users. 63% of users trust the recommendations, 88% still verify them against reviews or sources, and only 18% felt ready to contact the business straight from the AI answer.
BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 · · 1,002 US adults (455 used AI for local recommendations)
Section H · Money
Ads inside AI answers
The two biggest independent AI search companies picked opposite answers to the same question in the same month. OpenAI put ads in ChatGPT. Perplexity took them out.
$1B
ChatGPT ads hit a $1 billion annualised run rate about 200 days after launch
annualised ad revenue run rate
Ads launched in ChatGPT on 9 February 2026 and reached $100 million annualised in the first six weeks. Live in 40+ countries. Reported target: $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year.
OpenAI, reported by Quartz · · Company disclosure
26%
26% of ChatGPT responses now contain an ad
of ChatGPT responses include an ad
About a third of ads appear in the first response; a meaningful fifth of impressions land 10 or more messages into a session.
Similarweb · · Similarweb panel
<0.1%
Perplexity dropped ads: they were under 0.1% of revenue
of Perplexity revenue came from ads before it stopped
A Perplexity executive told the Financial Times "the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything". Subscriptions from about $20 to $200 a month are the model instead.
Perplexity, reported by Search Engine Land (via the Financial Times) · · Company statement
Section I · Reconciliation
Why the numbers disagree
Eight sets of figures get quoted against each other every week. In each case both are right about something different. Here is what each one measures and which to use for which claim.
1. Zero-click: 68% or 22%?
SparkToro (68.01%) uses Similarweb's desktop and mobile panel and counts a search as zero-click unless it leads to a website outside Google. A click into Maps, YouTube or Images stays zero-click. Datos (22.4%) is desktop only and counts a click on anything, Google properties included. Use SparkToro for "how often does Google keep the user", Datos for "how often does a desktop searcher click nothing at all".
2. AI Overview CTR: down 58%, or recovering?
Ahrefs compares December 2023 with December 2025 for the number one result only, across 300,000 keywords. Seer tracks its own 53 clients month by month across all positions, and shows a trough in September 2025 followed by a partial recovery. Pew measures people, not keywords. All three agree on direction. Quote Ahrefs for the size of the drop, Seer for the shape over time, Pew for user behaviour.
3. How many searches show an AI Overview?
Pew found 18% in March 2025 across real people's searches. Conductor found 25% in autumn 2025 across 21.9 million tracked queries. Seer finds 36% of informational queries and 5% of transactional ones. Coverage depends entirely on what people are searching for. Any single "X% of all searches" figure without a query mix attached is a guess.
4. Chatbot share: 54%, 35% or 44%?
Similarweb (ChatGPT 53.9%) counts web visits. Datos (34.8%) counts desktop users of a panel. Pew (44%) asks adults whether they have ever used it. Three denominators, three numbers, all for the same product. Name the measure every time.
5. Crawl-to-refer ratios move monthly
Cloudflare's ratio for Anthropic went from 286,930:1 in January 2025 to 38,065:1 in July 2025, and the live Radar dashboard has moved again since. Blog posts quoting "73,000:1" or "4,580:1" are usually snapshots from different months. Always attach the month.
7. Reddit: 18%, 12%, 4% or 1% of citations?
All four numbers are in circulation for the same site. Ahrefs' 18.5% is the share of AI Overviews that cite reddit.com at least once. 5W's 11.97% is Reddit's share of all US ChatGPT citation events in January and February 2026. Promptwatch's 3.83% is Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations in July and August 2026, and Conductor's 1.01% is its share across several LLMs in January 2026. Different platforms, different months, different denominators. The direction is the same in every dataset since autumn 2025: down. The August 2026 cliff is the one to quote, with its dates.
8. Is Google search shrinking?
Gartner predicted a 25% fall in search engine volume by 2026. Datos shows Google at 94.3% of US desktop search events in March 2026, with searches per user rising. Google reports queries at an all-time high. Apple testified that Safari searches dipped once in April 2025. Volume is up; clicks out of Google are down. Those are different claims.
Section J · Do not cite
Numbers we won't put on this page
Each of these is in wide circulation. None of them survives a trip to the source.
- "Search volume will drop 25% by 2026." A Gartner forecast from February 2024, not a measurement. The 2026 data above shows volume rising. Quote it as a prediction that missed, or not at all.
- "AI Overviews appear on 48% of searches." Circulates on a dozen statistics roundups attributed to BrightEdge, Semrush or Similarweb. We could not find a primary page from any of them stating it. The highest sourced figure we have is Conductor's 48.75% for healthcare queries only.
- "ChatGPT has 1 billion weekly active users." OpenAI's 31 July 2026 statement says its models reach more than one billion active users. It does not say weekly, and it does not say ChatGPT. The last ChatGPT-specific weekly figure is 900 million.
- "Anthropic crawls 73,000 pages per referral." A June 2025 snapshot. Cloudflare's July 2025 figure was 38,065:1, and the live Radar figure changes every month. Use the dated number or the live dashboard.
- "Reddit blocked OpenAI in robots.txt, that's why the citations vanished." Repeated on several marketing blogs after the August 2026 drop. Neither Reddit nor OpenAI has said so. Promptwatch, which produced the data, says it cannot rule out a data-collection issue; OpenAI says it sets no fixed visibility for any site. Until one of them explains it, the cause is unknown.
- "AI visitors convert 23x better." A headline we could not trace to any study that reports it. The sourced multiples are Semrush's 4.4x and Adobe's 54%.
Section K · Our own data
What people actually search for
We pulled US search demand for this topic cluster on 2 September 2026. The plain reading: almost nobody searches for "AI search statistics". The money is in "AI SEO statistics", where advertisers pay over $20 a click.
| Query (US) | Searches / month | CPC | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| chatgpt statistics | 390 | $7.24 | 75 |
| ai search market share | 260 | $0.00 | 46 |
| generative engine optimization statistics | 110 | $0.00 | 27 |
| ai seo statistics | 70 | $20.35 | 47 |
| ai search statistics 2026 | 50 | $0.00 | 0 |
| ai search statistics | 20 | $6.63 | 0 |
| ai overviews statistics | 20 | $0.00 | 0 |
| ai overview click through rate | 20 | $0.00 | 0 |
Source: Semrush, US database, pulled 2 September 2026 by Just Digital
Section L · Method
Method, licence, how to cite
A number makes the page only if we can name the organisation that produced it, the date it was published and the sample or method behind it, and link to the page where it lives. Roundups of other roundups don't count as a source. When a source blocks crawlers or sits behind a paywall, the row is marked "Reported" and names the outlet we took it from.
Company figures from Google and OpenAI are labelled as company disclosures. Nobody outside those companies has audited them.
We re-check the page monthly and log changes below. Spotted a wrong number? Send it to Dom on LinkedIn with the source and we'll fix it and credit you.
How to cite this page
Just Digital (2026). AI Search Statistics 2026. justdigital.world/statistics/ai-search. Updated 2 September 2026.
For an individual figure, cite the original study named in the row and link here for the compilation. The dataset and the charts are licensed CC BY 4.0. Embed, screenshot, republish, with attribution.
Changelog
- 2026-09-02 · Added the Reddit citation drop: Promptwatch (ChatGPT Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode), Conductor (October 2025 to January 2026) and Reddit's own Q2 2026 call. Figure 6 and reconciliation 7 are new.
- 2026-09-02 · First publication. 52 statistics, 41 read on primary pages.
Quick answers
Frequently asked questions
- What share of Google searches are zero-click in 2026?
- 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website in January to April 2026, according to SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data. Datos measures 22.4% for US desktop in March 2026 because it only counts desktop and treats a click to a Google property as a click. Quote the definition with the number.
- How much do Google AI Overviews reduce clicks?
- Ahrefs found a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result when an AI Overview appears (300,000 keywords, December 2023 vs December 2025). Pew Research found users clicked a result on 8% of searches with an AI summary against 15% without. Seer Interactive found organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell to 0.61% in September 2025 and recovered to 2.36% by February 2026.
- How many people use ChatGPT in 2026?
- OpenAI reported 900 million weekly active users on 27 February 2026, with 50 million paying subscribers. On 31 July 2026 it said its models reach more than one billion active users, a broader measure than ChatGPT weekly users. Pew found 44% of US adults have used ChatGPT.
- How much website traffic comes from AI search?
- 1.08% of all website sessions, according to Conductor's analysis of 13,770 enterprise domains and 3.3 billion sessions. ChatGPT sends 87.4% of that traffic. Semrush found an AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times a traditional organic visitor, and Adobe found AI visitors to US retail sites convert 54% better than non-AI visitors.
- Are AI tools citing Reddit less in 2026?
- Yes, on every dataset published since autumn 2025. Promptwatch measured Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations at 3.83% from 18 July to 7 August 2026 and 0.52% from 14 to 17 August, an 86% drop in four days. Over the same weeks Reddit's share fell 11% in Google AI Overviews and 31% in AI Mode. Conductor found Reddit's share across LLMs halved between October 2025 and January 2026, from 2.02% to 1.01%. Reddit itself told investors on 30 July 2026 that search referrals were choppy in the quarter. Nobody has published a cause for the August drop.
- Can I use these statistics and charts?
- Yes. The dataset and the charts on this page are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Cite the original study for the number and link to justdigital.world/statistics/ai-search for the compilation. Every row includes the original source URL, publication date and sample size.