AI search & GEO statistics 2026

weekly active users on ChatGPT as of February 2026, up from 400M a year earlier.

people a month now see Google's AI Overviews, across 200+ countries.

monthly active users on Google's Gemini app as of Q4 2025, up from ~350M in April 2025.

of search still goes to Google. AI chatbot traffic equals just 2.96% of search-engine traffic. AI search is growing fast, but it is not yet where most searches happen.

of all Google searches produced an AI summary, and 58% of users saw at least one in a month.

the range of how often AI Overviews appear, depending on the keyword set and tracker. There is no single number, so always name the source.

of long, 10-or-more-word searches trigger an AI Overview, versus only 8% of 1-to-2-word searches. Longer, question-style searches are where AI answers show up.

growth in AI Overviews on commercial-intent searches over roughly six months, as AI answers move from purely informational into buying queries.

of all AI citations come from earned media, including journalism, research, and encyclopedic sites. Paid and advertorial content is just 0.3%. This is the single most important fact in GEO: getting cited is mostly won off your own website.

of ChatGPT's top-10 cited sources are Wikipedia, its single most-cited domain. Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn also dominate across engines.

of AI summaries cite three or more sources, and only 1% cite a single source. AI answers pull from many pages, then name a few.

the overlap between the domains ChatGPT cites and the domains Perplexity cites. Each engine reads a largely different web, so visibility has to be measured per engine.

of the domains cited for the same question change from one month to the next. Over six months, 70 to 90% of cited domains are completely different.

the citation half-life. In one study, 73% of specific URLs were cited only once before disappearing. A one-time audit is worthless here.

of brands stay visible from one AI answer to the next. AI visibility is a volatile channel that has to be monitored continuously, not measured once.

people clicked a search result only 8% of the time when an AI summary was present, versus 15% without it. Just 1% clicked a link inside the summary.

of US Google searches ended without any click in 2026, up from about 60% in 2024. Only about 276 of every 1,000 searches now reach the open web.

drop in click-through rate for the number-one organic result when an AI Overview is present.

more organic clicks for brands that are cited inside an AI Overview, versus non-cited brands on the same searches. Being named partly offsets the click loss.

the rate at which AI-referred visitors convert, compared with standard organic search visitors, because they arrive later in the decision.

AI search was just 0.5% of one company's traffic but drove 12.1% of its signups, roughly a 23x higher conversion rate. The volume is small, the intent is high.

of brands systematically track AI search performance at all. The measurement gap is the opportunity: most competitors are flying blind.

the estimated cut to organic web traffic as about 80% of consumers now rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches.

of the links AI engines cite also appear in Google's top 10 for the same query. Ranking well helps, but most AI citations come from pages that do not rank at the top.

the share of AI Overview citations that also ranked in Google's organic top 10 fell from 76% in mid-2025 to 38% by early 2026. The link between ranking and being cited is weakening.

brand mentions across the web correlate about three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do. Being talked about matters more than being linked to.

of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. A business can be number one on Google and still never get named by AI.