AI Search Statistics (2026): AI Overviews, ChatGPT and the New SERP

AI search has moved from novelty to default: ChatGPT now serves 900 million people a week, Google's AI Overviews reach billions of searchers, and roughly two thirds of US Google searches end without a click to any website. This page collects 28 verified AI search statistics, every one linked to the study or announcement it came from and dated precisely, because numbers in this space go stale within months.

We compiled these figures for our own client work at Orkkid, an SEO and GEO agency for solar companies, and we keep the list deliberately strict: no invented numbers, no zombie stats, primary sources wherever possible. Feel free to cite any statistic here with credit.

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TL;DR

• In our October 2026 test of 120 AI answers across eight cities, 79.4% of the 558 businesses that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode recommended did not appear in Google's top 20 map results for the same search (Orkkid, 2026).
• AI search statistics for 2026 show ChatGPT at 900 million weekly active users (OpenAI, February 2026) and Google's AI Overviews at more than 2 billion monthly users (Alphabet, July 2025).
• 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website in January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 (SparkToro, 2026).
• AI Overviews cut the click-through rate of the top organic result by 34.5%, based on 300,000 keywords (Ahrefs, 2025).
• AI platforms sent 1.13 billion referrals to the world's top 1,000 websites in June 2025, up 357% year over year (Similarweb, 2025).
• AI search visitors convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic visitors (Semrush, 2025), and nearly 90% of pages cited by ChatGPT rank in position 21 or lower in traditional results (Semrush, 2025).
• Google still processes more than 5 trillion searches a year, about 14 billion a day (Search Engine Land, 2025). Search is not shrinking; clicks per search are.

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Original data from Orkkid's October 2026 study

Every other statistic on this page comes from a third party, and this section holds our own data. On 7 October 2026 we asked five AI engines to recommend the best moving company, wedding photographer and solar installer in eight cities, matched every pick against Google Maps, and classified every source the engines cited. The full write-up is in our AI recommendation study.

The headline for any local business: ranking in Google Maps and being recommended by AI are two different results. Three in four businesses in the map top 20 were named by no AI at all, and most of the businesses the AIs did name came from outside that top 20.

Industry review sites such as moveBuddha, The Knot and EnergySage supplied 39.6% of everything the engines cited, which makes your profile on those sites part of how AI decides who to recommend. Google AI Mode was the only engine that cited Google's own pages.

Review volume was the clearest pattern among the 480 map businesses: those with 500 or more Google reviews were named 4.5 times as often as those with under 50. If you want one number to work on this quarter, make it your review count.

Key statistics at a glance

1. ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users as of OpenAI's announcement on February 27, 2026, up from 800 million in October 2025 (TechCrunch, 2026).
2. Google's AI Overviews had more than 2 billion monthly users by July 2025, across 200 countries and territories (TechCrunch, 2025).
3. 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 (SparkToro, 2026).
4. AI Overviews cut the click-through rate of the number one organic result by 34.5%, based on 300,000 keywords (Ahrefs, 2025).
5. Google users clicked a traditional result on just 8% of searches that showed an AI summary, versus 15% without one (Pew Research Center, 2025).
6. AI platforms sent 1.13 billion referrals to the world's top 1,000 websites in June 2025, up 357% year over year, per Similarweb data (TechCrunch, 2025).
7. AI search visitors are worth 4.4 times more than traditional organic visitors measured by conversion rate (Semrush, 2025).
8. Google's Gemini app passed 950 million monthly active users by the Q2 2026 earnings call, roughly tripling year over year (TechCrunch, 2026).
9. Nearly 90% of pages cited by ChatGPT search rank in position 21 or lower in traditional organic results for related queries (Semrush, 2025).
10. Google still processes more than 5 trillion searches a year, about 14 billion a day, its first official volume update since 2016 (Search Engine Land, 2025).

AI assistant adoption: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

The assistants themselves are the fastest-adopted consumer software in history, and the growth has not slowed.

• ChatGPT: 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers as of February 27, 2026, per OpenAI's own announcement, up 100 million weekly users since October 2025 (TechCrunch, 2026).
• 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, roughly double the 2023 share, per a Pew Research Center survey of 5,123 adults conducted in February and March 2025 (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• 58% of US adults under 30 have used ChatGPT, versus 25% of those aged 50 to 64 and 10% of those 65 and over, in the same Pew survey (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• 28% of employed US adults use ChatGPT for work, up from 8% in 2023 (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Gemini passed 950 million monthly active users by Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings call in July 2026, up from 750 million in February 2026 (TechCrunch, 2026).
• Perplexity handled 780 million queries in May 2025 and was growing more than 20% month over month, per CEO Aravind Srinivas at Bloomberg's Tech Summit (TechCrunch, 2025).
• The market is fragmenting: ChatGPT's share of worldwide generative AI web visits fell from about 76% in June 2025 to roughly 53% by May 2026, while Gemini climbed to around 27 to 28% and Claude to about 9% (Similarweb, 2026).
• Total visits to generative AI platforms grew 70% year over year to 9.5 billion monthly, across 655 million unique visitors (Similarweb, 2026).

What it means for service businesses: the Pew age curve is the useful signal. If your customers skew younger, like couples planning a wedding or first-time home buyers planning a move, a meaningful slice of them already start their research in an AI assistant rather than a search box. Our guide to what generative engine optimization is covers how to show up there.

Google AI Overviews: rollout and coverage

AI Overviews are the single biggest change to the Google SERP since ads, and they have been live in most markets since late 2024.

• AI Overviews expanded to more than 100 countries on October 28, 2024, taking the feature to more than 1 billion monthly users (Google, 2024).
• By July 2025 AI Overviews reached over 2 billion monthly users across 200 countries and territories, per Sundar Pichai on Alphabet's Q2 2025 earnings call, and drove over 10% more queries on searches where they appear (TechCrunch, 2025).
• AI Overview coverage is volatile: the share of tracked keywords triggering one went from 6.49% in January 2025 to a 24.61% peak in July, then back to 15.69% by November, across Semrush's 10 million keyword dataset (Semrush, 2025).
• AI Overviews are moving into commercial searches. Informational queries fell from 91.3% of AI Overview triggers in October 2024 to 57.1% in October 2025, while commercial intent rose to 18.57% and transactional to 13.94% (Semrush, 2025).
• 18% of all real-user Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary, per Pew's browser-tracking study of 900 US adults and 68,879 searches (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together account for 15% of the sources listed in AI Overviews, making them the most cited sites (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• AI Mode, Google's fully conversational search tab, passed 100 million monthly active users in the US and India by July 2025 (TechCrunch, 2025) and crossed 1 billion users during Q2 2026 (TechCrunch, 2026).

What it means for service businesses: the intent shift matters most. When Overviews were mostly informational, service businesses could ignore them. Now that nearly a third of triggers are commercial or transactional, questions like "how much do long-distance movers cost" or "best solar installers with battery storage" increasingly get an AI answer first. See our walkthrough on how to rank in Google AI Overviews.

Zero-click search: what happens to the clicks

The most cited, and most misquoted, area of AI search research. Here is what the measured studies actually say.

• 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website in January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024, per SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb panel data (SparkToro, 2026).
• When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on only 8% of searches, versus 15% without one, in Pew's March 2025 tracking study (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Only 1% of visits to a page with an AI summary produced a click on a link inside the summary itself (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Users ended their browsing session after 26% of searches with an AI summary, versus 16% without (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• The top-ranked organic result loses 34.5% of its expected click-through rate when an AI Overview is present, per Ahrefs' April 2025 comparison of 300,000 keywords before and after the US rollout (Ahrefs, 2025). The same study found 99.2% of AI Overview keywords carried informational intent.
• A counterpoint worth knowing: Semrush found that when the same keywords started showing AI Overviews, their zero-click rate actually fell slightly, from 33.75% to 31.53% (Semrush, 2025). Measurement methodology matters enormously in this debate.
• For scale: Google still handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, roughly 14 billion a day (Search Engine Land, 2025). Search is not shrinking; clicks per search are.

What it means for service businesses: the click studies above measure Google as a whole, and the effect is strongest on informational content. If your site relies on blog traffic from "how to" and "what is" questions, expect fewer clicks even where rankings hold, and start measuring whether AI answers name you.

→ Not sure where you stand? Our free GEO audit tests the questions your customers ask and shows you the answer. Check my AI visibility.

AI referral traffic: small, growing fast, and unusually valuable

AI assistants send far less traffic than Google, but the visitors they send behave differently.

• AI platforms generated 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites in June 2025, up 357% year over year, per Similarweb. Google Search generated 191 billion referrals over the same period, so AI referrals were well under 1% of Google's volume (TechCrunch, 2025).
• ChatGPT alone accounted for more than 80% of AI referrals to those top 1,000 domains in mid 2025 (TechCrunch, 2025).
• AI referrals to news and media sites grew 770% year over year to June 2025 (TechCrunch, 2025).
• AI search visitors convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic search visitors, per Semrush's July 2025 study of 500+ digital marketing topics across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Overviews and AI Mode. The same study projects LLM visitors could surpass traditional search visitors by early 2028 for its topic set (Semrush, 2025).
• Ahrefs measured it on their own site: AI search was 0.5% of visits but drove 12.1% of signups, a 23x higher conversion rate than organic search (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Nearly 90% of pages cited by ChatGPT search rank in position 21 or lower for related queries in traditional organic search, and about half of ChatGPT's links point to business and service websites (Semrush, 2025).

What it means for service businesses: that last statistic is the opportunity. AI assistants routinely cite pages that would never crack page one of Google, which resets the competitive field for smaller businesses competing against big national brands. The catch is your content has to be structured for machines to quote, which is the core of generative engine optimization. Our guide on how ChatGPT decides which businesses to recommend explains the selection logic.

What it means for your business

Pulling the threads together:

• Visibility is splitting across surfaces. Google is still 14 billion searches a day, but 900 million people a week are also asking ChatGPT, and 950 million a month are in Gemini. Ranking well in one surface no longer guarantees presence in the others.
• Clicks are decoupling from visibility. With US zero-click rates at 68% and a 34.5% CTR penalty under AI Overviews, traffic will keep falling even where rankings hold. Measure citations and branded demand, not just sessions.
• The traffic that remains is better. At 4.4x to 23x higher conversion rates, a small AI referral stream can outperform a much larger organic one. Attribution deserves real attention before you conclude AI search "sends nothing".
• The long tail is open. With ~90% of ChatGPT citations coming from beyond position 20, well-structured content from lesser-known domains genuinely gets quoted.

For the practical playbook, start with our GEO guides, or see how we apply this for moving companies, wedding vendors, and solar companies.

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Stats to stop citing

Three claims that circulate widely and should not appear in your next strategy deck:

• "Search volume will drop 25% by 2026." This was a Gartner prediction from February 2024, not a measurement, and reporting at the time noted it rested on a survey of just 299 consumers (Search Engine Land, 2024). Measured reality: Google confirmed volume above 5 trillion searches a year in 2025, its highest ever disclosure (Search Engine Land, 2025).
• "ChatGPT has billions of users." Billions of visits is not billions of users. Similarweb counts 9.5 billion monthly visits across all generative AI platforms combined, from 655 million unique visitors (Similarweb, 2026). OpenAI's own figure is 900 million weekly active users (TechCrunch, 2026).
• Any undated "X% of searches show an AI Overview" claim. Semrush's tracker recorded 6.49% in January 2025, 24.61% in July 2025 and 15.69% in November 2025 (Semrush, 2025). A coverage figure without a month attached is meaningless.

Methodology and sources

Every statistic on this page was verified against the linked source in July 2026. We prioritized primary sources: official OpenAI and Google announcements, earnings calls, and first-party studies from Pew Research Center, Similarweb, Semrush, SparkToro and Ahrefs. Where a company announcement was only available via press coverage, we linked the report that carried the original figures (TechCrunch, Search Engine Land). Predictions are labelled as predictions. Figures are dated to the month they were measured or announced, not the month a summary article was published. If you spot a figure that has been superseded, email us and we will update it.

Primary studies referenced: Pew Research Center's AI summaries click study (March 2025 data), Pew's ChatGPT adoption survey (February to March 2025), Ahrefs' AI Overviews CTR study (April 2025), Ahrefs' AI conversion data (June 2025), Semrush's AI Overviews study (full-year 2025), Semrush's AI search traffic study (July 2025), SparkToro's zero-click study (January to April 2026) and Similarweb's generative AI landscape data (through May 2026).

How we got this data

The original figures above come from Orkkid's AI Recommendation Study, run on 7 October 2026. We asked ChatGPT (gpt-5.5), Perplexity (sonar-pro), Gemini (gemini-3.8-flash) and Claude (claude-sonnet-5-5), all with web search on, plus Google AI Mode: "Who is the best {moving company, wedding photographer or solar installer} in {city}? Give me your top picks." We ran it in Denver, Austin, Phoenix, Charlotte, Seattle, Tampa, London and Toronto, for 120 answers, 824 recommendations and 558 unique businesses, and matched every pick by name against the Google Maps top 20 for the same industry and city (480 listings). Each prompt ran once per engine, so the results are a snapshot: AI answers vary between runs, and the map top 20 reflects a city-center search. The full method and data are in our AI recommendation study.

Frequently asked questions

How many people use AI search in 2026?

ChatGPT reported 900 million weekly active users in February 2026 (TechCrunch, 2026), Gemini passed 950 million monthly users by mid 2026 (TechCrunch, 2026), and Google's AI Overviews reached over 2 billion monthly users (TechCrunch, 2025). There is heavy overlap between those audiences, so they cannot be added together.

What percentage of Google searches are zero-click?

The most recent measured figure is 68.01% of US Google searches ending without a click to any website, covering January to April 2026 (SparkToro, 2026).

Do AI Overviews reduce website traffic?

For informational queries, yes. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% CTR drop for the top organic result when an AI Overview is present (Ahrefs, 2025), and Pew found users click traditional results roughly half as often when a summary appears (Pew Research Center, 2025). Semrush's same-keyword analysis found a smaller effect (Semrush, 2025), so the honest answer is: significant for informational content, still being measured elsewhere.

Is AI search traffic actually worth anything?

Yes, disproportionately so. Semrush found AI search visitors convert at 4.4x the rate of organic visitors (Semrush, 2025), and Ahrefs found 0.5% of its traffic from AI search drove 12.1% of signups (Ahrefs, 2025).

Are AI Overviews available outside the US?

Yes. Google rolled AI Overviews out to more than 100 countries on October 28, 2024 (Google, 2024), and by July 2025 they reached more than 2 billion monthly users across 200 countries and territories (TechCrunch, 2025). If you want your business cited in them, start with our guide to ranking in Google AI Overviews.

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Citing these statistics: you are welcome to reference any figure on this page in your own articles, decks or reports. Please credit Orkkid and link to this page (https://orkkid.com/blog/ai-search-statistics), and keep the original source links intact so the researchers who did the measuring get their due. If you want a GEO strategy built on this data, get in touch.