AI assistant usage and adoption
Your customers now ask AI assistants for answers at a scale that rivals search, so being part of those answers is becoming part of being found.
OpenAI said ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users, up from 800 million reported in October 2025, along with 50 million paying subscribers.
Source: TechCrunch, ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (2026-02-27) · Link to this stat
ChatGPT is on the verge of 1 billion weekly active users, according to figures OpenAI shared internally as reported by The Information; OpenAI had hoped to hit that mark by the end of 2025.
Source: The Next Web, OpenAI hit its billion-user goal, just seven months late (2026-07-29) · Link to this stat
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that more than 1 billion people use the Gemini app every month.
Source: 9to5Google, Gemini app passes 1 billion monthly users (2026-08-11) · Link to this stat
44% of U.S. adults say they use ChatGPT, up from 34% in 2025, 23% in 2024 and 18% in 2023.
Source: Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026: Chatbots, Smart Devices and Views on Impact (appendix) (2026-06-17) · Link to this stat
Beyond ChatGPT, 24% of U.S. adults say they use Gemini, 17% Copilot, 14% Meta AI, 8% Grok and 6% Claude.
Source: Pew Research Center, ChatGPT tops the list of chatbots Americans use, across age groups (2026-06-17) · Link to this stat
Generative AI websites averaged 9.5 billion web visits a month worldwide, up 70% year over year, from 655 million unique visitors.
Source: Similarweb, AI Search Stats 2026: Market Share, Referral, and Citation Data (2026-07-29) · Link to this stat
ChatGPT's share of worldwide generative AI web visits fell from about 76% to about 53% between June 2025 and May 2026, while Gemini rose from under 9% to about 27 to 28% and Claude from about 2% to close to 9%.
Source: Similarweb, AI Search Stats 2026: Market Share, Referral, and Citation Data (2026-07-29) · Link to this stat
A Microsoft spokesperson said total monthly active Copilot users, commercial and consumer combined, reached 150 million, and Microsoft reported 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats.
Source: TechCrunch, Satya Nadella insists people are using Microsoft's Copilot AI a lot (2026-01-29) · Link to this stat
Perplexity received 780 million queries in May 2025, CEO Aravind Srinivas said onstage at Bloomberg's Tech Summit.
Source: TechCrunch, Perplexity received 780 million queries last month, CEO says (2025-06-05) · Link to this stat
OpenAI's own study of ChatGPT use found non-work messages grew from 53% to more than 70% of all usage, and almost half of all usage is either practical guidance or seeking information.
Source: The Register (reporting OpenAI research), OpenAI study: How people use ChatGPT (2025-09-16) · Link to this stat
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google now answers many questions on the results page itself, which changes how often your website gets the click even when you rank well.
Google said AI Mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users since its global expansion.
Source: Google, Q2 2026 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO (2026-07-22) · Link to this stat
Google said AI Overviews have over 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories.
Source: Google, Q2 earnings call: CEO's remarks (2025) (2025-07-23) · Link to this stat
With its Q3 2026 results, Alphabet said AI Mode queries average about three times the length of traditional searches and about one in five AI Mode searches use voice, images or documents.
Source: PPC Land (reporting Alphabet Q3 2026 results), Gemini app gains 350M users in a year to pass 1bn, Alphabet says (2026-10) · Link to this stat
In Pew's tracking of 900 U.S. adults, 18% of Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary, and 58% of panelists ran at least one search that did.
Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (2025-07-22) · Link to this stat
Users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% of visits without one.
Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (2025-07-22) · Link to this stat
Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself on just 1% of visits to pages with a summary.
Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (2025-07-22) · Link to this stat
AI Overviews correlate with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page, based on December 2025 data across 300,000 keywords.
Source: Ahrefs, Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (2026-02-04) · Link to this stat
For informational queries, organic click-through rate in September 2025 was 0.61% when an AI Overview appeared versus 1.62% when it did not.
Source: Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update (2025-11-04) · Link to this stat
Paid click-through rate on queries with AI Overviews fell 68%, from 19.70% in June 2024 to 6.34% in September 2025.
Source: Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update (2025-11-04) · Link to this stat
Brands cited in an AI Overview earned about 35% higher organic click-through and about 91% higher paid click-through than brands not cited, though Seer notes it cannot prove citation causes the lift.
Source: Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update (2025-11-04) · Link to this stat
One year after AI Overviews launched, total Google search impressions increased by over 49% while click-throughs fell nearly 30%.
Source: BrightEdge, One Year Into Google AI Overviews, BrightEdge Data Reveals Google Search Usage Increases by 49% (2025-05-14) · Link to this stat
BrightEdge reported AI Overviews appear in over 11% of Google queries, a 22% increase since launch.
Source: BrightEdge, One Year Into Google AI Overviews, BrightEdge Data Reveals Google Search Usage Increases by 49% (2025-05-14) · Link to this stat
The share of keywords triggering AI Overviews rose from 6.49% in January 2025 to a peak of 24.61% in July 2025, then settled at 15.69% in November 2025.
Source: Semrush, Semrush AI Overviews Study (2025-12-15) · Link to this stat
Zero-click searches and traffic impact
A growing share of searches end without a visit to any website, so traffic alone no longer tells you how visible your business is.
58.5% of U.S. Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches ended with zero clicks.
Source: SparkToro and Datos (via Search Engine Land), 2024 Zero-Click Search Study (2024-07) · Link to this stat
For every 1,000 U.S. Google searches, only 360 clicks go to the open web, and nearly 30% of U.S. clicks go to Google-owned properties like YouTube and Maps.
Source: SparkToro and Datos (via Search Engine Land), 2024 Zero-Click Search Study (2024-07) · Link to this stat
Users ended their browsing session on 26% of Google pages with an AI summary, versus 16% of pages without one, and around two-thirds of all searches ended without a click on a result link.
Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results (2025-07-22) · Link to this stat
Zero-click news searches rose from 56% before AI Overviews launched in May 2024 to nearly 69% as of May 2025.
Source: Similarweb (via TechCrunch), ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines (2025-07-02) · Link to this stat
Organic search traffic to news sites fell from over 2.3 billion visits at its mid-2024 peak to under 1.7 billion.
Source: Similarweb (via TechCrunch), ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines (2025-07-02) · Link to this stat
Cloudflare said Google's referrals have been clearly declining since February 2025, with April 2025 referrals about 15% lower than January.
Source: Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals (2025-08-29) · Link to this stat
When the same keywords began showing an AI Overview, Semrush found the zero-click rate actually fell slightly, from 33.75% to 31.53%.
Source: Semrush, Semrush AI Overviews Study (2025-12-15) · Link to this stat
Gartner predicted traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 as people shift to AI chatbots and other virtual agents.
Source: Gartner (via Search Engine Land), Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026 (2024-02-19) · Link to this stat
AI referral traffic to websites
AI assistants send a small but fast-growing slice of visits, and those visitors tend to arrive ready to act.
Across 44,421 sites, ChatGPT accounted for 0.19% of traffic compared with Google's 41.9%.
Source: Ahrefs (via PPC Land), ChatGPT traffic reaches 0.19% while Google maintains 41.9% share (2025-08-20) · Link to this stat
63% of 3,000 websites studied received at least one visit from an AI chatbot, and ChatGPT sent 50% of that AI traffic.
Source: Ahrefs, AI Traffic Study (2025-02-06) · Link to this stat
The average AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times the average traditional organic search visitor, measured by conversion rate.
Source: Semrush, AI Search and SEO Traffic Study (2025-07-21) · Link to this stat
During the 2025 holiday season, AI referrals to U.S. retail sites converted 31% better than other traffic sources, nearly doubling year over year.
Source: Adobe, AI-driven traffic surges across industries (2026-01-12) · Link to this stat
AI-referred visitors were 33% less likely to leave immediately, spent 45% more time on site and viewed 13% more pages per visit.
Source: Adobe, AI-driven traffic surges across industries (2026-01-12) · Link to this stat
In early 2025 Adobe found traffic from generative AI sources was 9% less likely to convert than other traffic, narrowing from a 43% gap in July 2024.
Source: Adobe, Adobe Analytics: Traffic to U.S. retail websites from generative AI sources jumps 1,200 percent (2025-03-17) · Link to this stat
ChatGPT referrals to news sites grew from just under 1 million in January through May 2024 to more than 25 million in 2025.
Source: Similarweb (via TechCrunch), ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines (2025-07-02) · Link to this stat
The share of U.S. ChatGPT prompts whose answers include a citation grew from about 1.6% in June 2025 to about 6.8% in May 2026.
Source: Similarweb, AI Search Stats 2026: Market Share, Referral, and Citation Data (2026-07-29) · Link to this stat
AI search is layering on top of Google rather than replacing it: 461 million of ChatGPT's 494 million users (95%) also used Google between March and May 2026.
Source: Search Engine Journal (reporting Similarweb data), AI Search Isn't Replacing Google, It's Layering On Top: Similarweb Data (2026-07-30) · Link to this stat
AI crawlers and bots
AI companies read your website far more often than they send visitors back, which makes what you allow them to see a real business decision.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time, with Cloudflare Radar showing agentic bots at 57.4% of web traffic and humans at 42.6%.
Source: SiliconANGLE (reporting Cloudflare Radar), AI agent web traffic surpassed humans, lending weight to dead internet theory (2026-06-04) · Link to this stat
In 2025, AI bots other than Googlebot accounted for 4.2% of HTML request traffic, while Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5%.
Source: Cloudflare, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review (2025-12-15) · Link to this stat
AI "user action" crawling, where a bot fetches pages on behalf of a person's question, increased by over 15x in 2025.
Source: Cloudflare, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review (2025-12-15) · Link to this stat
AI crawlers were the most frequently fully disallowed user agents found in robots.txt files in 2025.
Source: Cloudflare, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review (2025-12-15) · Link to this stat
Search engine crawlers generated 40% of Verified Bot traffic and AI crawlers 20%, with OpenAI's GPTBot alone originating about 7.5%.
Source: Cloudflare, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review (2025-12-15) · Link to this stat
Over the past 12 months, 80% of AI crawling was for training models, not for answering a user's question in real time.
Source: Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals (2025-08-29) · Link to this stat
Anthropic crawled about 38,000 pages for every referred page visit in July 2025, even after an 87% decline that year.
Source: Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals (2025-08-29) · Link to this stat
In July 2025, OpenAI's crawl-to-refer ratio was 1,091.4 pages crawled per referral, Perplexity's was 194.8 and Google's was 5.4.
Source: Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals (2025-08-29) · Link to this stat
Published crawl-to-refer figures for Anthropic attributed to Cloudflare have ranged from 70,900 to 1 down to 2,237 to 1 within about 13 months, because of differences in time windows, bot grouping and missing referrer data.
Source: Search Engine Journal, Everyone Is Quoting The Same Number And Getting Different Answers (2026-09-10) · Link to this stat
Cloudflare began blocking AI crawlers by default for its clients, letting sites allow or disallow crawling for training, fine-tuning and inference, and set a price for bots to crawl.
Source: MIT Technology Review, Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients' websites (2025-07-01) · Link to this stat
Local search and reviews
Reviews and recency now feed both Google and AI recommendations, so they decide whether a local business gets shortlisted at all.
97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% always read reviews, up from 29% the prior year.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (2026-02-11) · Link to this stat
45% of consumers used ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% the year before, making AI the third most popular source.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (2026-02-11) · Link to this stat
71% of consumers use Google for local recommendations, down from 83% in 2025, while Apple Maps use rose from 14% to 27%.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (2026-02-11) · Link to this stat
74% of consumers only consider reviews written in the last three months, and 32% look for reviews from the last two weeks, up from 20%.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (2026-02-11) · Link to this stat
31% of consumers will only use a business with 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17%, and 47% won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (2026-02-11) · Link to this stat
89% of consumers expect business owners to respond to reviews, 19% expect a same-day response, up from 6%, and 50% are put off by generic or templated replies.
Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (2026-02-11) · Link to this stat
52% of consumers started their most recent local business search on Google Search and 9% on Google Maps, but 75% used more than one channel before deciding.
Source: BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior 2026 (2026-07-09) · Link to this stat
23% of consumers used AI during their most recent local business search, and 31% use AI tools for local business recommendations at least monthly.
Source: BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior 2026 (2026-07-09) · Link to this stat
Only 8% of consumers chose AI as their first channel for a local search, and 43% of those AI-first searchers went on to check Google.
Source: BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior 2026 (2026-07-09) · Link to this stat
AI for shopping and recommendations
Shoppers are asking AI what to buy and who to buy from, and they arrive more confident when they do.
Generative AI tools drove a 693.4% increase in traffic to U.S. retail sites during the 2025 holiday season compared with the prior year.
Source: Adobe, Adobe: Holiday Shopping Season Drove a Record $257.8 Billion Online with Consumers Embracing Generative AI Tools (2026-01-07) · Link to this stat
On Cyber Monday 2025, AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 670% year over year, in a season when online spending hit a record $257.8 billion.
Source: Adobe, Adobe: Holiday Shopping Season Drove a Record $257.8 Billion Online with Consumers Embracing Generative AI Tools (2026-01-07) · Link to this stat
39% of U.S. consumers have used generative AI for online shopping and 53% planned to do so that year.
Source: Adobe, Adobe Analytics: Traffic to U.S. retail websites from generative AI sources jumps 1,200 percent (2025-03-17) · Link to this stat
Among consumers who used generative AI to shop, 55% used it for research, 47% for product recommendations and 43% to find deals.
Source: Adobe, Adobe Analytics: Traffic to U.S. retail websites from generative AI sources jumps 1,200 percent (2025-03-17) · Link to this stat
81% of consumers who use AI assistants for online shopping say it improved their experience, and 65% are more confident in their purchase after AI help.
Source: Adobe, AI-driven traffic surges across industries (2026-01-12) · Link to this stat
68% of AI shoppers say they are less likely to return a product bought with AI help, and more than 55% say they click the links AI gives them.
Source: Adobe, AI-driven traffic surges across industries (2026-01-12) · Link to this stat
OpenAI says hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT to find, understand and compare products, as it launched shopping research buying guides.
Source: OpenAI, Introducing shopping research in ChatGPT (2025-11-24) · Link to this stat