Greater Than Services
Start free trial

AI Search

AI search statistics 2026: the seven numbers that matter.

There are hundreds of AI search statistics in circulation and most of them describe the platforms, not your business. Seven of them change what a small business should do this quarter. Each is given here with its publisher and date, then placed beside what we measured ourselves across 50 buyer questions, and followed by the decision it points to. Figures we could not trace to a page we could read were left out, including several that are quoted everywhere.

Key takeaways

  • ChatGPT is no longer most of AI search. Its share of generative-AI web traffic fell from 73% to 56% in twelve months while Gemini doubled to 26% and Claude went from 2% to 9% (Similarweb, September 2026).
  • AI Overviews reach 43% of Google searches (Similarweb via TechCrunch, July 2026) and correlate with a 58% lower click-through rate for the first result (Ahrefs, February 2026). Being cited inside the overview more than doubles clicks per impression (Seer Interactive, April 2026).
  • The visitors AI sends are worth more. AI-referred traffic to US retail sites converts 60% better and yields 53% more revenue per visit (Adobe, July 2026 data).
  • Being named beats being linked. Only 6.8% of US ChatGPT desktop queries carried a citation in May 2026 (Similarweb). In our data ChatGPT named 8.9 businesses per answer and linked 4.9 websites.

1. ChatGPT is losing share to Gemini and Claude

ChatGPT carried 55.5% of worldwide generative-AI web traffic in August 2026, down from 73.3% a year earlier, according to Similarweb's September 2026 figures. Gemini went from 12.9% to 25.6% in the same twelve months, Claude from 1.9% to 9.3%, and Perplexity halved from 2.0% to 0.9%. Similarweb's July 2026 write-up gives the same picture with slightly different windows: ChatGPT from roughly 76% to around 53%, Gemini to 27 or 28%.

Share of generative-AI web traffic, August 2025 against August 2026
ChatGPT73.3% to 55.5%
Gemini12.9% to 25.6%
Claude1.9% to 9.3%
Perplexity2% to 0.9%

Grey is August 2025, purple is August 2026. Similarweb, reported 7 September 2026. DeepSeek, Grok and Copilot make up most of the remainder.

What it changes. A plan built around ChatGPT alone now covers about half of the traffic and a shrinking half. It also matters which assistant is likeliest to name you. In our July 2026 measurement Gemini named the most businesses per answer, 9.1, and leaned on directories least, 13% of its citations, which makes it the most winnable of the four for a business with a decent website and no directory presence. The Gemini guide sets out what that means in practice, including the Google-Extended mistake that costs a site its Google Search presence.

2. AI Overviews are on 43% of searches, and they take the click

Google said at I/O in May 2026 that AI Overviews have over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode passed 1 billion in its first year (Google, 19 May 2026). Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch in July 2026 has overviews appearing on 43% of searches, up from 15%, and AI Mode visits rising from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million in May 2026.

The click data is consistent across four independent measurements. Ahrefs (February 2026, 300,000 keywords, December 2025 data): the presence of an overview correlates with a 58% lower click-through rate for the first result. Seer Interactive (April 2026, 53 brands, 5.47 million queries): organic click-through of 2.36% with an overview against 3.82% without, and paid 16.21% against 21.85%. Pew Research (July 2025, 900 adults): a traditional result was clicked in 8% of visits with a summary against 15% without, and links inside the summary in 1% of visits. Semrush (July 2025): 92 to 94% of AI Mode sessions ended without a click. SparkToro's 2026 study, reported by Search Engine Land, puts US Google searches ending without a click at 68.01% in the first four months of 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024.

What it changes. Two things in that pile of numbers are useful rather than alarming. Seer found that being cited inside the overview delivered 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited, so the click did not vanish, it moved to whoever the overview quotes. And Amsive (April 2025) found the loss is a non-branded phenomenon: branded queries that showed an overview gained 18.68% click-through while non-branded lost 19.98%. Being the name somebody searches for is now worth more, not less.

3. The visitors AI sends are worth more, and there are more of them

AI-referred traffic to US retail sites rose 62% year on year in July 2026, converted 60% better than non-AI traffic and produced 53% more revenue per visit, according to Adobe Digital Insights data reported by Digital Commerce 360 on 19 August 2026. Those visitors spent 59% more time on site, bounced 33% less and added to cart 28% more. Against October 2024 the volume is up 1,219%. Semrush's June 2026 index reports a similar 1,324% rise to May 2026 for retail and 2,215% for travel; the two may share Adobe as an upstream source, so treat them as one reading, not two.

On the demand side, Pew Research (June 2026, 5,119 US adults surveyed in February) found about half of US adults now use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024, and six in ten read AI search summaries, 24% of them daily.

What it changes. The AI visitor is rarer than the search visitor and converts better, which is the profile of somebody who arrived already recommended. That is the argument for measuring whether you are the recommendation rather than counting the referral after the fact, because by the time a visitor lands, the assistant has already decided who to name.

4. Most ChatGPT answers carry no citation at all

Only 6.8% of US ChatGPT desktop queries included citations as of May 2026, Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch. When ChatGPT does cite, it cites a lot: Semrush's analysis of 126 million prompts from January to April 2026 found an average of 15 sources per response, against 3 for Gemini.

Our own measurement asks a narrower question: not what ChatGPT cites across all prompts, but what it does when somebody asks who to hire or buy from. We put 50 such questions, ten in each of five industries, to four assistants in July 2026 with web search on, and counted.

AssistantBusinesses named per answerWebsites cited per answerCitations that were directories
Gemini9.18.313%
ChatGPT8.94.926%
Claude5.96.418%
Perplexity4.57.818%

50 buyer questions across five industries, July 2026. Counted from recorded answers; the two counts above are distinct businesses and distinct websites per answer, which is why they sit below Semrush's per-response source count.

What it changes. ChatGPT named 8.9 businesses per answer and linked 4.9 websites, and for the ten B2B software questions it named 63 products and cited nothing at all, answering from memory. A strategy that counts only citations misses the answer that matters most: whether your name is in the shortlist. Measure named-or-not first, cited-or-not second.

5. What gets cited is social, directories and Wikipedia, not brand sites

YouTube took 22.9% of AI Overview citations across more than 3 million US queries, Reddit 18.5%, Facebook 10.1%, then Google's own pages 8.8%, Instagram 5.6%, Quora 4.7%, Wikipedia 4.0% and LinkedIn 0.6%, in Ahrefs' September 2026 analysis. Roughly six in ten citations went to social and community platforms. The mix moves fast: Semrush tracked ChatGPT's Reddit citations falling from about 60% of responses in early August 2025 to around 10% by mid-September.

Our data adds the part those averages hide: the source that stands between a business and the answer differs by industry. ChatGPT cited Clutch in seven of ten marketing-agency answers; for law firms it leaned on Chambers and Legal 500 in London and Singapore and on firms' own pages in India and the United States; for interior design it cited no directory at all, only practices' own websites; for B2B software, as above, nothing.

What it changes."Get listed everywhere" is the wrong plan and so is "just build a great website". Ask the assistants your buyers' questions, write down what they cite, and act on that list. The law-firm guide shows what the list looks like for one profession, market by market.

6. Google now counts your AI impressions, and lets you opt out

Since June 2026 Search Console has a performance report for AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and it carries impressions only. Google's help page defines an impression as a link to your site shown to a user in one of those features, with two links from one site counting once, and the report has no click data. In the same announcement, reported by Search Engine Land, Google said the per-site control to opt out of those features reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026, and that sites which opt out "do not get any traffic or impressions from these features". Meanwhile Google's CEO told investors in July that Google is "sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search", a claim no site owner can check with Google's own tool.

For scale, our own 48-page site recorded 42 impressions in that report in the 28 days to 5 September 2026, half of them on the homepage. Small, first-party, and the only count of Google's AI surfaces that does not come from a vendor.

What it changes. Two ten-minute jobs. Open Search Console, find the report and write the number down, because a trend needs a first reading. Then find Settings, Search generative AI, and confirm it says Include: the default is Include, but a control that removes every AI impression is worth eyeballing once.

7. ChatGPT ads exist, and they cannot reach paying users

Ads in ChatGPT show only on the Free and Go tiers; Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education users do not see them, as reported by MacRumors at the February 2026 launch. eMarketer reported in March that OpenAI claimed $100 million in annualised revenue six weeks in, that about 85% of ChatGPT's estimated 94.7 million US users were eligible to see ads but fewer than 20% were shown one on a given day, and a click-through rate of 0.91% against a 6.4% benchmark for Google search ads. In late August TechCrunch reported the India rollout with fifty brands and a daily minimum budget of ₹725.

What it changes. If your buyers research on a company ChatGPT seat or pay for Plus, no budget reaches them. The answer above the ad is the only placement that does, and it is built from pages the assistant can read. What ChatGPT ads can't buy you quotes OpenAI's own documentation on where the ad sits.

What to do this quarter

  1. This week: confirm the assistants can read your site. Every number above assumes it. Our free crawler checkreads your robots.txt and reports sixteen AI crawlers, including OpenAI's three separate agents.
  2. This week: take the Search Console reading.The AI report and the Include setting, ten minutes, written down with today's date.
  3. This month: ask the assistants your buyers' questions, three times each.Record who was named and what was cited. That second list is your plan for section 5, and it will not match anyone else's.
  4. This month: put a plain answer under the heading that matches each question.Seer's 120% figure is the reward for being the passage the overview quotes, and a quotable passage is the cheapest change on this page.
  5. This quarter: measure named-or-not weekly, per assistant. Gemini is doubling its share and names the most businesses. A plan that only watches ChatGPT is watching half the room.

Do not:

  • Quote a conversion or click figure you cannot trace to a page with a date on it. Several widely repeated ones in this category could not be traced to any source we could read, and they were left out of this article for that reason.
  • Treat a ChatGPT ad as a route into the answer. It sits below the answer and never reaches a paying user.
  • Opt your site out of Google's AI features to protest the click loss. Google states the result is no traffic or impressions from those features at all.

Common questions

What percentage of Google searches show an AI Overview in 2026?

About 43%, according to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch in July 2026, up from 15% when the feature launched. Pew Research measured 18% of searches producing an AI summary in a March 2025 panel study, so the share has roughly doubled in a year on the broader measurement. Google itself says AI Overviews have over 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode over 1 billion, from its I/O keynote in May 2026.

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites?

For non-branded queries, yes, by every measurement we could verify. Ahrefs found the presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower click-through rate for the first organic result, on December 2025 data across 300,000 keywords. Seer Interactive measured organic click-through at 2.36% with an overview against 3.82% without in February 2026. Pew Research found users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with a summary against 15% without. The exception is branded searches: Amsive measured click-through rising 18.68% on branded queries that showed an overview, while non-branded fell 19.98%.

Which AI assistant sends the most traffic to websites?

ChatGPT, still, but by a shrinking margin. Similarweb's August 2026 figures put ChatGPT at 55.5% of generative-AI web traffic, Gemini at 25.6%, Claude at 9.3% and Perplexity at 0.9%, against 73.3%, 12.9%, 1.9% and 2.0% a year earlier. Adobe's data, reported in August 2026, shows AI-referred traffic to US retail sites up 62% year on year in July 2026 and converting 60% better than non-AI traffic.

Can I see AI search traffic in Google Search Console?

Impressions, yes; clicks, no. Since June 2026 Search Console has a performance report for AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and Google's help page defines an impression as a link to your site shown to a user in one of those features. The report carries no click data. Google also rolled out a per-site control to opt out of those features to all websites on 31 August 2026, and states that sites which opt out get no traffic or impressions from them.

Sources

Every external figure was read on the page linked below on 8 September 2026. Where a primary document could not be fetched, the figure is attributed to the outlet that reported it and described as reported. Publisher and date are given with each number in the text above.

The per-assistant figures are our own. The study sets out the questions, the assistants, the dates and the variance control, and the raw dataset is published under CC BY so you can recount them. If a figure here does not match its source, tell us and we will correct it.

Related reading