AI Search Statistics 2026: ChatGPT, AI Overviews and Clicks

ChatGPT reached 900 million weekly active users in February 2026, according to OpenAI. When Google shows an AI summary, Pew Research found users click a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appears. Among B2B software buyers, 51% now start research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, according to G2.

#Key numbers

#1. How many people use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude

• 900 million people used ChatGPT each week, and 50 million paid for it, OpenAI said alongside its funding announcement. (TechCrunch, 27 Feb 2026)
• 800 million weekly ChatGPT users was the figure Sam Altman gave on stage at OpenAI DevDay (CEO statement at an event). (TechCrunch, 6 Oct 2025)
• 950 million monthly active users for the Gemini app, Sundar Pichai said on Alphabet's Q2 2026 earnings call. (Google, 22 Jul 2026)
• 780 million queries ran through Perplexity in May 2025, CEO Aravind Srinivas said at Bloomberg's Tech Summit (CEO statement at an event). (TechCrunch, 5 Jun 2025)
• 15 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats, Satya Nadella said on Microsoft's January 2026 earnings call. (TechCrunch, 29 Jan 2026)
• 2.66 million US desktop unique visitors used Claude in March 2026, up 130.1% from February. ChatGPT had 33.86 million. (Comscore, 26 May 2026)
• 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, rising to 58% of adults under 30, in a survey fielded February to March 2025. (Pew Research Center, 25 Jun 2025)
• 28% of employed US adults use ChatGPT for work, up 20 points in two years. (Pew Research Center, 25 Jun 2025)
• 9.5 billion average monthly web visits went to generative AI sites worldwide from June 2025 to May 2026, up 70% year over year. (Similarweb, 29 Jul 2026)

#2. Google AI Overviews and AI Mode reach

• 2 billion monthly users saw AI Overviews, available in 200 countries and territories, Pichai said on the Q2 2025 earnings call. (TechCrunch, 23 Jul 2025)
• Over 1 billion monthly active users for AI Mode, up from over 100 million in the US and India in July 2025. (Google, 22 Jul 2026)
• 18% of 68,879 Google searches made by 900 US adults in March 2025 produced an AI summary. (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025)
• 53% of searches of 10 or more words produced an AI summary, against 8% of one or two word searches. (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025)
• 24.61% of keywords in Semrush's 10 million keyword set triggered an AI Overview in July 2025, up from 6.49% in January. (Semrush, 15 Dec 2025)
• 15.69% of those keywords showed an AI Overview in November 2025, after the summer peak. (Semrush, 15 Dec 2025)

#3. What AI answers do to clicks

• 8% of visits with an AI summary led to a click on a traditional result, against 15% of visits without one. (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025)
• 1% of visits to pages with an AI summary included a click on a link inside the summary. (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025)
• 26% of visits to pages with an AI summary ended the browsing session, against 16% without one. (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025)
• 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears, across 300,000 keywords compared between December 2023 and December 2025. (Ahrefs, 4 Feb 2026)
• 61% drop in organic CTR and 68% drop in paid CTR on AI Overview queries from June 2024 to September 2025, across 3,119 terms. (Seer Interactive, 4 Nov 2025)
• 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks went to brands cited in an AI Overview than to brands not cited. Seer calls this a correlation. (Seer Interactive, 4 Nov 2025)
• Nearly 69% of news searches ended without a click to a news site by May 2025, up from 56% when AI Overviews launched in May 2024, per Similarweb. (TechCrunch, 2 Jul 2025)

#4. Which sources AI answers cite

• 47.9% of ChatGPT's top 10 cited sources were Wikipedia, in Profound's study of 680 million citations from August 2024 to June 2025. (Profound, 5 Jun 2025)
• 46.7% of Perplexity's top 10 cited sources were Reddit. (Profound, 5 Jun 2025)
• 21.0% of Google AI Overviews' top 10 cited sources were Reddit, and 18.8% were YouTube. (Profound, 5 Jun 2025)
• 22.9% of US AI Overview citations among the top 50 cited domains went to YouTube in September 2026, ahead of Reddit at 18.5% and Facebook at 10.1%. (Ahrefs, updated 2 Sep 2026)
• 54.5% of AI Overview citations came from pages that also rank organically in September 2025, up from 32.3% in May 2024. (BrightEdge, 18 Sep 2025)
• 71.0% of AI Overview citations in B2B tech overlapped with organic rankings in September 2025. (BrightEdge, 18 Sep 2025)
• 6% of sources in Google AI summaries were .gov sites, against 2% in standard results. (Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025)

#5. B2B buyers and AI research

• 51% of B2B software buyers start research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29% a year earlier. G2 surveyed 1,076 buyers in March 2026. (G2, 15 Apr 2026)
• 69% of those buyers chose a different vendor than planned because a chatbot recommended it. (G2, 15 Apr 2026)
• 63% of B2B software research done in chatbots happens in ChatGPT. (Demand Gen Report, 4 May 2026)
• 94% of B2B buyers use large language models in their buying process. (6sense, Nov 2025)
• 61% of the way through the buying journey is when buyers first contact a seller, down from about 69% in 2024. (6sense, Nov 2025)
• 45% of B2B buyers used GenAI during a recent purchase, mainly to gather vendor and product information. Gartner surveyed 645 buyers in August and September 2025. (Gartner, 20 May 2026)
• 51% of buyers in the same survey said they are more likely to meet misleading information from GenAI, against 49% from a sales rep. (Gartner, 20 May 2026)

#6. Referral traffic from AI

• 693.4% year-over-year growth in traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites from 1 November to 31 December 2025. (Adobe, 7 Jan 2026)
• 31% higher conversion for AI referrals than for other traffic sources over the 2025 holiday season. (Adobe, 12 Jan 2026)
• 120% growth in AI-driven traffic to tech and software sites in the 2025 holiday season, against 539% for travel. (Adobe, 12 Jan 2026)
• 0.25% of an average site's total traffic came from AI, and ChatGPT sent more than 80% of it, across 81,947 websites. (Ahrefs, 26 Jun 2025)
• More than 25 million ChatGPT referrals reached news sites in 2025, up from just under 1 million from January to May 2024, per Similarweb. (TechCrunch, 2 Jul 2025)

#7. Forecasts

These are predictions, not measurements.

• 25% drop in traditional search engine volume by 2026, with search marketing losing share to AI chatbots (forecast). (Gartner, 19 Feb 2024)
• 50% or more decline in brands' organic search traffic by 2028 as consumers adopt generative AI search (forecast). (Gartner, 14 Dec 2023)
• 90% of B2B buying will be AI agent intermediated by 2028, pushing over $15 trillion of B2B spend through AI agent exchanges (forecast). (Gartner, 14 Nov 2025)

#How to use these numbers

• Rank first, then get cited. BrightEdge found 71.0% of B2B tech AI Overview citations come from pages that also rank organically. Fix the pages that already rank for your category before chasing new formats.
• Be on the shortlist the chatbot builds. With 51% of software buyers starting in a chatbot and 69% switching vendors on its advice, publish clear comparison, pricing and use-case pages that a model can quote word for word.
• Show up where models read. Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia dominate AI citations across platforms. A founder who answers questions in the right subreddits and posts explainer videos gives AI answers more places to find the company.

#Methodology

Every figure on this page was checked against its original publisher or a named news report of that publisher's data, and was last checked on 15 October 2026. Figures are reported as the source states them, with no rounding or combining. Studies by Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, Semrush, BrightEdge, Profound and Similarweb are vendor research with their own samples and methods. CEO statements made at events or on earnings calls are labelled as such. Forecasts are kept in a separate section.

#Sources

1. "ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users", TechCrunch, 27 Feb 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/chatgpt-reaches-900m-weekly-active-users
2. "Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users", TechCrunch, 6 Oct 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/06/sam-altman-says-chatgpt-has-hit-800m-weekly-active-users/
3. "Q2 2026 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO", Google, 22 Jul 2026, https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/
4. "Google's AI Overviews have 2B monthly users, AI Mode 100M in the US and India", TechCrunch, 23 Jul 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/23/googles-ai-overviews-have-2b-monthly-users-ai-mode-100m-in-the-us-and-india
5. "Perplexity received 780 million queries last month, CEO says", TechCrunch, 5 Jun 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/05/perplexity-received-780-million-queries-last-month-ceo-says/
6. "Satya Nadella insists people are using Microsoft's Copilot AI a lot", TechCrunch, 29 Jan 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/29/satya-nadella-insists-people-are-using-microsofts-copilot-ai-a-lot
7. "Consumer AI Chatbots Keep Climbing in March", Comscore, 26 May 2026, https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/Consumer-AI-Chatbots-Keep-Climbing-in-March
8. "34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, about double the share in 2023", Pew Research Center, 25 Jun 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-adults-have-used-chatgpt-about-double-the-share-in-2023/
9. "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results", Pew Research Center, 22 Jul 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results
10. "AI Search Stats 2026: Market Share, Referral, and Citation Data", Similarweb, 29 Jul 2026, https://aisearch.similarweb.com/blog/gen-ai-stats/
11. "Semrush AI Overviews Study", Semrush, 15 Dec 2025, https://www.semrush.com/blog/semrush-ai-overviews-study/
12. "AI Overviews Reduce Clicks (Update)", Ahrefs, 4 Feb 2026, https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/
13. "AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update", Seer Interactive, 4 Nov 2025, https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update
14. "ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines", TechCrunch, 2 Jul 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/chatgpt-referrals-to-news-sites-are-growing-but-not-enough-to-offset-search-declines
15. "AI Platform Citation Patterns", Profound, 5 Jun 2025, https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/ai-platform-citation-patterns
16. "Most Cited Domains in AI Overviews", Ahrefs, updated 2 Sep 2026, https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-ai-overviews/
17. "AI Overview Citations Now 54% from Organic Rankings", BrightEdge, 18 Sep 2025, https://www.brightedge.com/resources/weekly-ai-search-insights/rank-overlap-after-16-months-of-aio
18. "The Answer Economy", G2, 15 Apr 2026, https://company.g2.com/news/g2-research-the-answer-economy
19. "Half of B2B software buyers now start their research with AI chatbots: G2", Demand Gen Report, 4 May 2026, https://demandgenreport.com/industry-news/news-brief/half-of-b2b-software-buyers-now-start-their-research-with-ai-chatbots-g2/52737
20. "2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report", 6sense, Nov 2025, https://6sense.com/report/buyer-experience/
21. "Gartner Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights", Gartner, 20 May 2026, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-20-gartner-survey-finds-sixty-nine-percent-of-b-two-b-buyers-turn-to-sales-reps-to-validate-ai-generated-insights
22. "Adobe: Holiday Shopping Season Drove a Record $257.8 Billion Online", Adobe, 7 Jan 2026, https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/01/adobe-holiday-shopping-season
23. "AI-driven traffic surges across industries", Adobe, 12 Jan 2026, https://business.adobe.com/blog/ai-driven-traffic-surges-across-industries
24. "AI Traffic Increase Study", Ahrefs, 26 Jun 2025, https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-increase/
25. "Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026", Gartner, 19 Feb 2024, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents
26. "Gartner Predicts 50% of Consumers Will Significantly Limit Their Interactions with Social Media by 2025", Gartner, 14 Dec 2023, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-12-14-gartner-predicts-fifty-percent-of-consumers-will-significantly-limit-their-interactions-with-social-media-by-2025
27. "Strategic Predictions for 2026", Gartner, 14 Nov 2025, https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/strategic-predictions-for-2026