AI search is now mainstream, and it changes who gets seen. ChatGPT reports 900 million weekly users (OpenAI), Google attaches an AI summary to 18% of searches and 60% of question searches (Pew Research Center), and when a summary appears, clicks to websites roughly halve. This page collects 30 statistics on AI search behaviour, every one linked to the organisation that produced it, refreshed monthly.
One rule governs this page: every statistic links to its original source, with the year stated on the claim. Anything I could not trace to the organisation that produced it was left out rather than guessed.
AI search statistics: the key numbers
The ten most quotable numbers at a glance. Full context and source links for all 30 sit in the sections below.
| Key finding | Source |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026 | OpenAI, via TechCrunch, 2026 |
| 94% of B2B buying groups use LLMs at some point in the buying process | G2, via Foundation, 2025 |
| 18% of Google searches show an AI summary, rising to 60% for question searches | Pew Research Center, 2025 |
| Users click a result link on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without | Pew Research Center, 2025 |
| Top-ranking pages lose 58% of their clickthrough rate when an AI Overview appears | Ahrefs, 2026 |
| Reddit captures 19.9% of citations in Google AI Mode, more than any other domain | Ahrefs Brand Radar, 2026 |
| LinkedIn is the most-cited domain for professional queries across six AI engines | Profound, 2026 |
| Only 10.15% of 57.2 million B2B citations pointed to brand-owned domains | Foundation and AirOps, 2026 |
| 61.7% of AI citations link a brand’s page without naming the brand in the answer | Semrush, 2026 |
| The average AI search visitor converts at 4.4 times the rate of an organic visitor | Semrush, 2025 |
How many people use AI search?
ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026. (OpenAI, via TechCrunch, 2026.) That was up from 800 million in October 2025, announced alongside 50 million paying subscribers. It remains the last official figure: The Information reported in late July 2026 that weekly actives were nearing 1 billion.
49% of US adults now use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024, and 44% have used ChatGPT specifically. (Pew Research Center, 2026.) From a survey of 5,119 adults in February 2026, published that June. Half the US adult population now uses the interfaces that answer without a results page.
94% of B2B buying groups now use LLMs at some point in the buying process, and in organisations with more than 1,000 employees, 30% of buyers start with AI before a search engine. (G2 2025 Buyer Report, cited in Foundation and AirOps’ Hidden Selection Phase report, 2026.)
Gartner predicted in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots and virtual agents absorb queries. (Gartner, 2024.) The prediction that reset marketing budgets, now inside its own deadline.
Semrush projects that AI search visitors will surpass traditional search visitors in 2028. (Semrush, 2025.) The projection comes from its study of 500+ high-value marketing topics across Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
How often do Google searches show an AI Overview?
Semrush’s 10-million-keyword tracking showed AI Overviews on 6.49% of queries in January 2025 and 13.14% by March 2025, before peaking near 25% in mid-2025 and settling around 15 to 16% by late 2025. (Semrush, 2025.) The share doubled in two months, then Google recalibrated.
The share of commercial-intent search results carrying an AI Overview grew 71% between November 2025 and April 2026, with finance queries up 231%. (Semrush, 2026.) AI Overviews started as an informational feature. They are moving down the funnel.
In Pew Research Center’s browsing-data study, 18% of real Google searches produced an AI summary in March 2025, rising to 60% for searches phrased as questions. (Pew Research Center, 2025.) The more your buyers search like they speak, the more often the summary intercepts them.
99.2% of keywords that trigger an AI Overview are informational in intent. (Ahrefs, 2025.) Transactional and navigational queries largely still deliver the classic results page.
What do AI answers do to clicks?
Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result link on 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared. (Pew Research Center, 2025.) Half the clicks are gone before anyone reaches a website. Sessions also ended entirely on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% without.
Only 1% of visits to a page with an AI summary produced a click on a source cited inside that summary. (Pew Research Center, 2025.) Being cited is a visibility play far more than a traffic play.
The presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page, in Ahrefs’ 300,000-keyword comparison of March 2024 against March 2025. (Ahrefs, 2025.)
By December 2025 data, that gap had widened to a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for top-ranking pages. (Ahrefs, 2026.) Same 300,000-keyword method, eight months on. The trend line points one way.
Which domains do AI engines cite most?
YouTube is the most-cited domain in Google AI Overviews, capturing 21.1% of citations in July 2026. (Ahrefs Brand Radar, 2026.) Ahrefs refreshes this table monthly. Google says AI Overviews reach over 2 billion monthly users, which makes this the widest-reach citation surface in AI search.
Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit are the most frequently cited sources in Google’s AI summaries, together accounting for 15% of all listed sources. (Pew Research Center, 2025.) Three platforms, none of which most brands publish on deliberately.
Wikipedia is ChatGPT’s single most-cited source at 7.8% of its citations, while Reddit leads on both Google AI Overviews (2.2%) and Perplexity (6.6%). (Profound, 2025.) Each engine has its own source diet, which is why single-engine visibility checks mislead.
Across 6.8 million citations, 86% came from sources brands can directly manage or strongly influence, such as websites and listings. (Yext, 2025.) A useful counterweight to the Reddit-does-everything narrative: once location and intent are factored in, owned and managed surfaces still dominate.
How often do AI engines cite Reddit?
Reddit is the single most-cited domain in AI-generated answers, ahead of YouTube and LinkedIn, in Peec AI’s analysis of 30 million cited sources. (Peec AI, via Search Engine Land, 2026.)
Reddit captures 19.9% of citations in Google AI Mode, the highest mention share of any domain, ahead of YouTube at 17.0% and Wikipedia at 4.9%. (Ahrefs Brand Radar, July 2026.) Ahrefs refreshes this table monthly, so treat the exact figure as a moving one.
Reddit and LinkedIn both sat among the top five most-cited domains on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity in Semrush’s three-month tracking, but ChatGPT sharply cut its Reddit and Wikipedia citations in mid-September 2025. (Semrush, 2025.) AI visibility is volatile. A source that anchors answers one month can be demoted the next.
How often do AI engines cite LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is the number one cited domain for professional queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity, and jumped from around #11 to #5 among ChatGPT’s most-cited domains between November 2025 and February 2026. (Profound, 2026.) Posts and long-form articles drove the rise, growing from 26.9% to 34.9% of LinkedIn citation types, while profile-page citations fell.
A LinkedIn URL appears in 14.3% of ChatGPT Search responses and 13.5% of Google AI Mode responses, making LinkedIn the second most-cited domain behind Reddit in Semrush’s 325,000-prompt study. (Semrush, 2026.) For professional topics, the feed post you publish today is a citable source tomorrow.
How often do AI engines cite your own website?
Across 57.2 million citations covering 50 B2B brands, only 10.15% pointed to brand-owned domains. (Foundation and AirOps, 2026.) Nine out of ten links shaping what AI says about a brand belong to someone else.
When a buyer searches for a brand by name, 77.6% of AI responses include at least one citation from that brand’s own domain. (Foundation and AirOps, 2026.) Branded queries are the safe zone. The problem starts one step earlier.
On unbranded queries, only 2.2% of cited links came from brand-owned domains, and 85% of those responses cited no brand-owned source at all. (Foundation and AirOps, 2026.) Early-stage discovery, the moment shortlists form, is where owned content disappears.
61.7% of AI citations are ghost citations: the platform links a brand’s page as a source, but the brand’s name never appears in the answer. (Semrush, 2026.) Being cited, being named and being recommended are three different outcomes, and a citation alone is not visibility.
Does AI search traffic convert?
Measured by conversion rate, the average AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times the average traditional organic search visitor. (Semrush, 2025.) These visitors arrive pre-briefed by the model, closer to a decision.
AI search delivered 0.5% of Ahrefs’ website visitors but 12.1% of its signups. (Ahrefs, 2025.) First-party data from a company willing to publish its own funnel numbers, showing a roughly 23x conversion advantage.
AI-referred traffic to US retail sites grew 62% year on year in July 2026, up 1,219% since October 2024, and converted 60% better than non-AI traffic, the eleventh consecutive month AI conversion has led. (Adobe Analytics, 2026.) AI-referred shoppers also generate 53% more revenue per visit. A full reversal from early 2025, when AI visitors still converted below the non-AI rate.
Anthropic’s crawlers made roughly 2,237 page requests for every referral visit sent back in Cloudflare Radar’s window ending 21 July 2026, against 217 for OpenAI and under 5 for Google. (Cloudflare Radar, via SEOmator, 2026.) A year earlier, Cloudflare’s June 2025 sample week measured Anthropic at roughly 70,900 requests per referral. The exchange rate is improving fast, but the direction of the trade is unchanged: engines consume far more than they send back, which is exactly why the traffic that does arrive converts so well. It is pre-qualified by the answer.
Methodology
Curation. Every statistic on this page links to the organisation that produced it, with the year stated on the claim. Vendor studies measure different things (mention share, citation share, response share) over different windows, so figures are not directly comparable across studies, and I have kept each claim in its own study’s terms. Where a figure is refreshed by its publisher, such as Ahrefs’ monthly citation tables, the month is stated. No statistic on this page is estimated, modelled or reconstructed by blimpp.
Who maintains this. This page is maintained as part of Project Cited, blimpp’s public experiment in AI search visibility. To see which pages AI engines currently cite around your own brand, run a free check at leoseo.com.
For definitions of the terms used on this page, see the AI Search Index. More on the author at Harpal Singh.
Changelog
This page is refreshed monthly. Each refresh re-checks every source link and updates figures their publishers have revised.
- 24 August 2026, v1.0. Page published with 30 statistics curated from primary sources. Next scheduled refresh: September 2026.