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, 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.

Key statistics at a glance

1. ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users as of OpenAI's announcement on 27 February 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 on 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 on 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 27 February 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 on 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 on year to 9.5 billion monthly, across 655 million unique visitors (Similarweb, 2026).

Australian relevance: these are global or US figures because no platform publishes Australian user counts, but the Pew age curve is the useful signal for local businesses. If your customers skew under 40, a meaningful slice of them already start buying research in an AI assistant rather than a search box. Our guide to generative engine optimisation 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 Australia has had them since late 2024.

• AI Overviews expanded to more than 100 countries, including Australia, on 28 October 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).

Australian relevance: Australian SERPs have shown AI Overviews since October 2024, and the intent shift matters most here. When Overviews were mostly informational, service businesses could ignore them. Now that nearly a third of triggers are commercial or transactional, "best plumber Sydney" style queries 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.

Australian relevance: all of the panel studies above are US or EU based, and no equivalent Australian clickstream study exists yet. Treat the US numbers as a leading indicator: Australia received AI Overviews about five months after the US, and behaviour has tracked the same direction.

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 on 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 on 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).

Australian relevance: 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 Australian businesses competing against big national brands. The catch is your content has to be structured for machines to quote, which is the core of answer engine optimisation.

What it means for Australian businesses

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 AEO guides.

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 prioritised 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).

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). No Australia-specific clickstream study has been published yet.

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 live in Australia?

Yes. Google rolled AI Overviews out to more than 100 countries including Australia on 28 October 2024 (Google, 2024), and coverage has expanded since. 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 need Australian-specific AI search data or an AEO strategy built on it, get in touch.