AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion people a month, and about two in three US Google searches end without a click. Even so, AI assistants send only about 1% of visits to the enterprise sites Conductor tracks, and 0.43% across the 115,254 sites in the Ahrefs tracker.
That gap tells you AI search is changing who gets seen well before it shows up in your traffic report. We collected 72 AI SEO statistics from Google, Pew Research Center, Ahrefs, Semrush, Seer Interactive, Cloudflare and others, and we opened every source to check the number, the date and the method.
Where good studies disagree, we show them side by side and explain why. You'll also find a calculator that turns the benchmarks into an AI traffic estimate for your own site. We use the same data to plan the work we do as a GEO agency.
How Many People Use AI Search in 2026
Google's AI features reach the most people. AI Overviews alone have more monthly users than any chatbot in our data, and Google says its AI features increase the total number of searches.
Google's AI features
These numbers come from Google itself, so they show reach and growth without the detail an outside study would give. Still, they're the only official figures we have for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2.5 billion monthly users | for AI Overviews, while AI Mode passed 1 billion within a year of launch | GoogleMay 2026 · Company statement |
| AI Mode queries more than doubled every quarter | since launch, and Google Search queries reached an all-time high last quarter | GoogleMay 2026 · Company statement |
| Billions of clicks every week | go to websites from AI features in Search, and Google says AI Mode adds to total search queries | AlphabetJul 2026 · Earnings remarks |
| 200+ countries and 40+ languages | get AI Overviews, and Google says they raised usage by over 10% for the queries that show them in the US and India | GoogleMay 2025 · Company statement |
Chatbots: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude
Outside Google, ChatGPT leads by a wide margin. Interestingly, its web traffic has held near 1 billion monthly visits since late 2025 in Semrush's US data, while the Gemini app grew from 400 million to 950 million monthly users in about a year.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 950 million monthly users | for the Gemini app, up from 400 million a year earlier, with daily users tripling | AlphabetJul 2026 · Earnings remarks |
| 44% of US adults | have used ChatGPT, up from 34% a year earlier, and about a quarter have used Gemini | Pew Research CenterJun 2026 · Survey of 5,119 |
| Near 1 billion monthly visits | to ChatGPT in Semrush's US clickstream, a plateau that held from November 2025 into early 2026 | SemrushApr 2026 · Clickstream panel |
| About 10% of the world's adults | had adopted ChatGPT by July 2025, and seeking information is one of the three topics that make up nearly 80% of conversations | NBERSept 2025 · Conversation sample |
| 80.48% of AI chatbot referrals | worldwide come from ChatGPT, ahead of Gemini (10.91%), Perplexity (5.85%), Copilot (1.79%) and Claude (0.95%) | StatCounterSept 2026 · Referral tracking |
How people use AI for search
Pew's 2026 survey shows that chatbots have become an everyday tool for many Americans. Graphite's panel data adds a detail that matters for marketers, since most AI use happens inside mobile apps, which web analytics tools can't see.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| About half of US adults | use AI chatbots, and roughly 1 in 4 use them every day | Pew Research CenterJun 2026 · Survey of 5,119 |
| 42% of US adults | use chatbots to search for information | Pew Research CenterJun 2026 · Survey of 5,119 |
| 6 in 10 US adults | read the AI summaries at the top of search results, while 3 in 10 don't | Pew Research CenterJun 2026 · Survey of 5,119 |
| AI sessions are 56% the size of search | worldwide and 34% in the US, while prompts that ask for information are 28% the size of searches (17% in the US) | GraphiteMar 2026 · Similarweb panel |
| 83% of AI use | happens in mobile apps worldwide, and 75% in the US | GraphiteMar 2026 · Similarweb panel |
Is AI replacing Google?
On desktop, AI tools are still a small slice of search. SparkToro and Datos counted searches across 41 large sites and found Google far ahead, and Google says its organic clicks have held steady. Our SEO statistics hub covers search volume and market share in more detail.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 3.2% of US desktop searches | happen on AI tools across 41 large sites with search, while Google alone handles 73.7% | SparkToroMar 2026 · Datos desktop panel |
| Organic clicks "relatively stable" | year over year, Google says, with slightly more quality clicks to websites, though it released no data | GoogleAug 2025 · Company statement |
How Often AI Overviews Appear
If you ask six studies how often AI Overviews show up, you'll get six answers ranging from about 16% to over 80%. Each study is accurate for what it measured, and the gap comes from the keyword set and from what counts as an AI answer.
Estimates by study
Semrush, Ahrefs and Conductor track very large, broad keyword sets, and they land between about 16% and 25%. BrightEdge reports on its own tracked keyword set, and First Page Sage counts AI Mode answers as well as AI Overviews across its clients' queries.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 15.69% of keywords | showed an AI Overview in November 2025, after rising from 6.49% in January to nearly 25% in July | SemrushDec 2025 · 10M+ keywords |
| 25.11% of Google searches | showed an AI Overview across 21.9 million unique US searches from September 15 to October 12, 2025 | ConductorNov 2025 · 21.9M searches |
| 48% of tracked queries | show an AI Overview, up from about 30% a year earlier, and the average one is over 1,200 pixels tall | BrightEdgeFeb 2026 · Tracked keyword set |
| 81.6% of US queries | showed an AI answer (an AI Overview or AI Mode) in September 2026, up from 23.4% a year earlier | First Page SageSept 2026 · Client data |
Which queries trigger them
The type of query makes a big difference. Questions and long queries trigger AI Overviews far more often than local searches, and on branded searches the monthly average climbed from 61.3% to 73.3% between July and September 2026.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 21% of all keywords | show an AI Overview, rising to 57.9% of question queries and 46% of queries with 7+ words, but only 7.9% of local searches | AhrefsNov 2025 · 146M SERPs |
| 82.91% of branded searches | on US desktop showed an AI Overview on September 29, 2026, and the monthly average climbed from 61.3% in July to 73.3% in September | AhrefsOct 2026 · 232.8M SERP crawls |
AI Overviews and Clicks
The large CTR studies we found all show fewer clicks on organic results when an AI Overview appears. The size of the drop depends on the year, the query type and whether your brand is cited inside the answer.
How much CTR falls
Ahrefs compared Google Search Console data from December 2023 and December 2025, and Pew tracked real browsing by 900 US adults, and both found fewer clicks. Pew also found that searchers ended their session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% without one.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 58% lower CTR | for the #1 result when an AI Overview appears, up from a 34.5% drop in Ahrefs' April 2025 study | AhrefsFeb 2026 · 300,000 keywords |
| Position 1 CTR fell from 7.3% to 1.6% | between December 2023 and December 2025 on keywords that show AI Overviews, compared with 7.6% to 3.9% on informational keywords without them | AhrefsFeb 2026 · 300,000 keywords |
| 8% of visits | with an AI summary led to a click on a regular result, compared with 15% without one, and just 1% clicked a link inside the summary | Pew Research CenterJul 2025 · Browsing data of 900 |
The 2026 rebound and the citation premium
Seer Interactive's earlier CTR studies appear in many AI SEO roundups. Encouragingly, its April 2026 update shows organic CTR on AI Overview queries climbing back to 2.4% by February 2026, and cited brands did much better than the rest.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4% organic CTR | on queries with an AI Overview in February 2026, up from a low of 1.3% in December 2025 | Seer InteractiveApr 2026 · 2.43B impressions |
| 120% more clicks | per impression for brands cited in an AI Overview than for uncited brands, though still 38% fewer than on queries with no AI Overview | Seer InteractiveApr 2026 · 2.43B impressions |
| Organic CTR doubled from 0.7% to 1.7% | during 2025 for brands cited in AI Overviews on transactional queries | Seer InteractiveApr 2026 · 2.43B impressions |
| 5.2% CTR | for the first source cited in an AI answer, 44% more than the #1 organic result on the same page (3.6%) | First Page SageSept 2026 · Client data |
First Page Sage's client data points the same way. The first source cited in an AI answer earned more clicks than the #1 organic result on the same page.
Zero-click searches and AI Mode
On Semrush's keywords, about a third of searches already ended without a click before an AI Overview appeared. Surprisingly, Semrush found the zero-click rate dipped slightly on the same keywords once an AI Overview appeared. AI Mode keeps people on the page, since 92% to 94% of its searches end without a click, though it still handles a tiny share of all searches.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Zero-click rate dipped from 33.75% to 31.53% | on the same keywords after they started showing AI Overviews | SemrushDec 2025 · Clickstream panel |
| 68.01% of Google searches | in the US ended without a click from January to April 2026, and only 0.34% of searches went to AI Mode | SparkToroJun 2026 · Similarweb panel |
| 92% to 94% of AI Mode searches | ended without a click to another site, and AI Mode queries averaged 7.22 words compared with 4.0 in regular search | SemrushJul 2025 · 69M sessions |
| About 80% of consumers | rely on zero-click results for at least 40% of their searches, which Bain estimates cuts organic traffic by 15% to 25% | Bain & CompanyFeb 2025 · Survey of 1,117 · Older study |
For click-through rates by ranking position, see our SEO statistics hub.
AI Referral Traffic
AI assistants send a small share of visits today, though that share is growing quickly. The exact size depends on whose sites you look at, so we show two large datasets side by side.
How much traffic AI sends
Conductor measured enterprise brands, where AI referrals reached 1.08% of sessions. The Ahrefs tracker follows a much wider set of 115,254 sites that use Ahrefs Web Analytics, where the share was 0.43% in September 2026. In the same tracker, Google referrals fell 3.0% a month on average while ChatGPT referrals grew 5.5%.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1.08% of website traffic | comes from AI referrals across 10 industries, highest in IT (2.80%) and Consumer Staples (1.91%) and lowest in Communication Services (0.25%) and Utilities (0.35%) | ConductorNov 2025 · 3.3B sessions |
| 0.43% of visits | came from AI assistants across 115,254 sites in September 2026 (ChatGPT 0.34%), compared with 26.82% from search | AhrefsSept 2026 · 115,254 sites |
How fast it's growing
Previsible tracked 166 GA4 properties for 19 months and found steep growth with some sharp swings along the way. Semrush's clickstream data shows the same rise from ChatGPT's side.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 9.9x growth in AI referral sessions | over 19 months, with ChatGPT sending 92.4% of them | PrevisibleJul 2026 · 166 GA4 properties |
| 50% drop in a single month | in AI referral sessions in November 2025, driven by ChatGPT referrals falling from 448,412 in October to 213,345 | PrevisibleJul 2026 · 166 GA4 properties |
| 206% growth in 2025 | in ChatGPT's outbound referral traffic, and 21.6% of it goes to Google | SemrushApr 2026 · Clickstream panel |
Which AI platforms send traffic
ChatGPT sends most AI referral traffic in all three datasets we found, between 80.48% and 92.4%. Previsible also found that Claude grew 64x over its tracking period and overtook Perplexity in March 2026, while Perplexity fell 61% from its peak and Copilot dropped 96%.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 87.4% of AI referral traffic | comes from ChatGPT across Conductor's 10 industries | ConductorNov 2025 · 3.3B sessions |
The visits analytics can't see
An AI mention often leads to a visit within the following week, and that visit rarely shows up as AI traffic. Profound measured this by joining AI conversations to the same people's browsing data.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1.5x to 2.5x the usual visits | to a brand's site in the 7 days after an AI assistant mentions it, though only about 2.5% of those visits carry an AI referral tag | ProfoundJul 2026 · Opt-in US panel |
If you want to know how often AI answers name you today, our free AI visibility audit checks the prompts your buyers ask.
What AI Search Cites
AI answers cite a wide mix of brand sites, forums, videos and media coverage. The data below shows how much Google rankings still help, and which kinds of pages get picked.
Does ranking on Google still matter?
Yes, though rankings explain less of what gets cited than they did in mid-2025. Ahrefs and BrightEdge disagree on the overlap with the top 10 because they track different keyword sets over different periods. AirOps found that ChatGPT left 85% of the pages it retrieved uncited.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 37.9% of AI Overview citations | rank in Google's top 10, down from about 76% in July 2025, and 31.0% rank outside the top 100 | AhrefsMar 2026 · 4M cited URLs |
| About 17% of AI Overview citations | rank in the organic top 10 in BrightEdge's data, from 24% in healthcare to 11% in finance | BrightEdgeFeb 2026 · Nine verticals |
| 43.2% of #1 Google pages | get cited by ChatGPT, 3.5x the rate for pages beyond Google's top 20 | AirOpsMar 2026 · 15,000 prompts |
How ChatGPT searches
ChatGPT sometimes splits a prompt into extra searches, called fan-out queries. AirOps found that 95% of these fan-out queries had zero monthly search volume, so keyword tools show no volume for most of them.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 34.5% of ChatGPT queries | turned on web search in February 2026, down from 46% in late 2024 | SemrushApr 2026 · Clickstream panel |
| 65% to 85% of ChatGPT prompts | match no keyword in Semrush's database, though search-style prompts rose from 18.9% to 34.9% | SemrushApr 2026 · 27B-keyword match |
| 14.4% of ChatGPT responses | contain fan-out queries, and 75.9% of its most common site: searches point at a brand's own site | AhrefsOct 2026 · 66.6M responses |
| 88% fewer Reddit citations | in ChatGPT over six months | AhrefsOct 2026 · Brand Radar data |
Ahrefs also found that 84.4% of factual questions about pricing, product features or company details cited at least one official source. For comparison questions, that share dropped to 68.3%.
The most-cited websites
Video and community sites lead the citation counts in Google's AI Overviews. Oddly, AI Overviews and AI Mode cite very different pages for the same query, even though they often name the same brands.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 13.7% of citations | overlap between AI Overviews and AI Mode, though a brand named in an AI Overview has a 61% chance of appearing in AI Mode too | AhrefsDec 2025 · 540K query pairs |
| 22.9% of AI Overview citations | go to YouTube, followed by Reddit (18.5%), Facebook (10.1%), google.com (8.8%), Instagram (5.6%), Quora (4.7%) and Wikipedia (4.0%) | AhrefsSept 2026 · 3M+ US queries |
| Almost 72% of outside citations | in branded AI Overviews go to Wikipedia, and 76.2% of those AI Overviews sit in position one | AhrefsOct 2026 · 100 brands |
Third-party mentions, reviews and earned media
What other sites say about you carries a lot of weight in AI answers. Studies from Muck Rack, AirOps and Wix Studio all find that most citations come from pages a brand doesn't own. Seer also found that review sites grow from 1.51% of citations at the awareness stage to 24.27% at the intent stage.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 0.737 correlation | between YouTube mentions and brand visibility in AI answers, the strongest Ahrefs found, ahead of branded web mentions (0.66 to 0.71) and far ahead of site page count (0.194) | AhrefsDec 2025 · 75,000 brands |
| Brands are 6.5x more likely | to surface through third-party content than through their own site on commercial discovery queries | AirOpsOct 2025 · 21,311 mentions |
| 84% of AI citations | come from earned media, with journalism at 27% and paid content at 0.3% | Muck RackMay 2026 · 25M+ links |
| 21.9% of citations | go to listicles, ahead of articles (16.7%) and product pages (13.7%), and 80.9% of all citations point to third-party pages | Wix Studio2026 · 1.06M citations |
| 1% median AI citation rate | for brands with no Trustpilot profile, compared with 53.5% for brands with as few as 1 to 13 reviews | Seer InteractiveMay 2026 · 804,491 AI responses |
For a worked example, see how we combined content, reviews and mentions in the SEO and GEO program that generated $500K of pipeline for a B2B SaaS company.
Freshness
Most of the pages that AI tools cite were updated in the past year. Thankfully, older pages count too once you refresh them.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 75% of pages cited by AI | were updated in the last year (88% in the last two years), and over a quarter of these fresh pages first went live more than two years ago | Seer InteractiveJul 2026 · 47,097 citations |
How Stable AI Answers Are
AI answers change from one run to the next, which makes a single check a poor guide. It makes more sense to measure visibility as a share across many prompts and runs.
Volatility
SparkToro and Gumshoe ran the same 12 prompts 2,961 times across AI tools, and Ahrefs checked the same AI Overviews again and again. Curiously, both found that answers rarely repeat exactly.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Less than a 1 in 100 chance | that ChatGPT or Google's AI gives the same list of brands in any two of 100 answers, and about 1 in 1,000 for the same order | SparkToroJan 2026 · 2,961 runs |
| 70% chance of changing | from one check of an AI Overview to the next, and 45.5% of citations change when it does | AhrefsNov 2025 · 43,000+ keywords |
Accuracy of links
AI assistants sometimes invent URLs on real domains, and the people who click them land on your 404 page unless you catch the pattern.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2.87x more visits to 404 pages | from AI assistants than from Google Search, and 2.38% of all URLs ChatGPT cites return a 404 | AhrefsSept 2025 · 16M cited URLs |
AI and B2B Buyers
B2B buyers now do a lot of their vendor research in AI tools, and G2 saw the share who start in a chatbot jump in one year. Understandably, ChatGPT leads for product research, since it has far more users than any other chatbot.
How B2B buyers use AI
G2 surveyed 1,076 software buyers and Semrush surveyed 643 B2B professionals in spring 2026. Admittedly, surveys capture what people say they do, yet both show AI as a regular part of vendor research.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 51% of B2B software buyers | start research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google, up from 29% in G2's 2025 report | G2Apr 2026 · Survey of 1,076 |
| 41% of B2B buyers | use Deep Research tools for software evaluations, and 1 in 3 bought from a vendor they had never heard of before | G2Apr 2026 · Survey of 1,076 |
| 66% of B2B professionals | regularly use AI to research vendors, and for product research 71% use ChatGPT, 61% Gemini, 45% Copilot, 18% Perplexity and 14% Claude | SemrushJul 2026 · Survey of 643 |
For more data on how B2B buyers research and shortlist vendors, see our B2B SEO statistics. If you sell software, our guide on GEO for B2B SaaS shows how to act on it.
Local search and AI
People now use AI to find local businesses as well. BrightLocal saw the share of US consumers doing this jump in a single year.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 45% of US consumers | use ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier | BrightLocalFeb 2026 · Survey of 1,002 |
| The #1 factor for local AI visibility | is a listing on expert-curated "best of" lists, according to the local search experts Whitespark surveyed | WhitesparkNov 2025 · Survey of 47 experts |
AI Crawlers and Bots
AI companies crawl a lot of the web, and they send back very different amounts of traffic in return. Cloudflare's 2025 review is the best view of this across a whole network that we found.
How much AI bots crawl
Unsurprisingly, Googlebot is still the busiest crawler in Cloudflare's data. Cloudflare also found that training crawls peaked at 7x to 8x the volume of search crawling.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 4.2% of HTML requests | came from AI bots on Cloudflare in 2025, while Googlebot alone made 4.5% | CloudflareDec 2025 · Cloudflare network |
| More than 15x growth | in AI "user action" crawling in 2025, where bots fetch pages to answer a person's question | CloudflareDec 2025 · Cloudflare network |
| Over 28% of verified bot traffic | came from Googlebot, compared with about 7.5% from OpenAI's GPTBot | CloudflareDec 2025 · Cloudflare network |
Crawl-to-referral ratios
Cloudflare compared how many pages each platform crawls with how many visits it sends back, and the platforms differ by several orders of magnitude.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 25,000 to 100,000 pages crawled | by Anthropic for each visit it referred in 2025, compared with up to 3,700 for OpenAI, under 200 for Perplexity from September and 3 to 30 for Google | CloudflareDec 2025 · Cloudflare network |
Blocking AI bots
More sites now name AI bots in robots.txt, and most top news sites block them. Reassuringly for publishers, most sites that block AI bots still show up in AI citations.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 4.5% of robots.txt files | on desktop sites name GPTBot, up about 55% from 2.9% in 2024, while ClaudeBot appears in 3.6%, Google-Extended in 3.4% and PerplexityBot in 2.8% | HTTP Archive2025 · HTTP Archive crawl |
| 79% of top news sites | block AI training bots and 71% block AI retrieval bots, while 14% block all AI bots and 18% block none | BuzzStreamApr 2026 · 100 news sites |
| About 75% of news sites | that block OpenAI or Google AI bots still appear in AI citations | BuzzStreamApr 2026 · 4M citations |
Do you need llms.txt?
An llms.txt file is a plain text guide to a site written for AI tools. Few sites have one, and in Ahrefs' data almost none of the files got any traffic.
| Stat | Insight | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1% of websites | have an llms.txt file, and among 137K sites on Ahrefs Web Analytics, 28% publish one and 97% of those files got zero traffic in May 2026 | HTTP ArchiveAhrefs2025 and Jun 2026 · Crawl and server logs |
AI Referral Traffic Estimator
This calculator applies the benchmarks above to your own site. Happily, it only needs your monthly sessions to start. Pick the baseline that fits you best, since enterprise brands in Conductor's data get a larger AI share than the wider set of sites in the Ahrefs tracker.
AI mentions also bring visits that carry no AI tag in your analytics. Profound measured 1.5x to 2.5x the usual brand site visits in the 7 days after a mention, with only about 2.5% tagged as AI, and none of that is counted here. An AI visibility audit shows how often AI answers name you today.
Sources: Conductor (Nov 2025), Ahrefs tracker (Sept 2026), StatCounter (Sept 2026), Previsible (Jul 2026; the 12.8% fast pace and the 7.6% "Other AI" share are our calculations from its data) and Profound (Jul 2026).
To walk through the default case, an enterprise IT brand with 50,000 sessions a month would expect about 1,400 AI referral sessions today at Conductor's 2.80%. At the fast pace for 12 months, that grows to about 5,940 a month.
Popular AI SEO Stats We Left Out
These numbers appear on many AI SEO statistics pages. We traced each one back to its source and decided to leave it out, for the reasons below.
- "ChatGPT traffic converts at 15.9%, compared with 1.76% for Google organic." This comes from a Seer Interactive case study of a single client, where AI was 0.07% of organic traffic. One site can't set a benchmark.
- "An AI search visitor is worth 4.4x an organic visitor." Semrush's 2025 projection study gives no sample or method for this figure.
- "Search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 because of AI chatbots." This is a Gartner prediction from February 2024, and we couldn't open the press release. Google says its queries reached an all-time high in 2026.
- "Only 14.4% of ChatGPT responses trigger a web search." Ahrefs corrected its own study in October 2026: 14.4% of responses contain fan-out queries. Semrush's clickstream puts web search at 34.5% of queries.
- "Adding statistics to content boosts AI visibility by 40%." This comes from a 2023 academic paper that found visibility gains of up to 40% on its own test set. It's a useful idea, though the paper didn't test it in ChatGPT or Google.
- "LLM bots now crawl 3.6x more than Googlebot." This comes from one vendor's set of sites. Cloudflare's network-wide data shows Googlebot alone at 4.5% of HTML requests and all AI bots together at 4.2%.
Our Sourcing Rules
- Every stat links to the company or research group that ran the study, and we skip roundups that quote other roundups.
- Each stat shows when it was published and how it was measured, with the sample size where the source gives one.
- When an agency or vendor measured its own clients, the source line says "Client data".
- When good studies disagree, we show both numbers side by side and explain how their methods differ.
- Data collected before 2025 carries an "Older study" tag.
Found a newer study or a number that changed? Email us at admin@perceptric.com and we'll update the page. Last updated October 24, 2026.
FAQ
How much traffic do ChatGPT and other AI tools send to websites?
A small share, though it is growing quickly. Conductor measured AI referrals at 1.08% of traffic across enterprise sites in 2025, and the Ahrefs tracker found 0.43% across 115,254 sites in September 2026. Previsible saw AI referral sessions grow 9.9x in 19 months, with ChatGPT sending 92.4% of them.
How often do AI Overviews appear in Google?
Studies disagree because they measure different keywords. Broad studies from Semrush, Ahrefs and Conductor put it between 15.69% and 25.11% of searches in late 2025, and BrightEdge reports 48% of its tracked queries. Ahrefs found AI Overviews on 82.91% of US desktop branded searches by September 29, 2026, and First Page Sage's client data shows AI answers on 81.6% of US queries when AI Mode is included.
Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?
Yes. Ahrefs found 58% lower CTR for the #1 result when an AI Overview appears, and Pew saw people click a regular result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, compared with 15% without one. Seer Interactive found organic CTR on these queries recovered to 2.4% in February 2026, and brands cited in the AI Overview got 120% more clicks than uncited brands.
How many people use AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT?
Google says AI Overviews have over 2.5 billion monthly users, AI Mode has passed 1 billion and the Gemini app has 950 million. In the US, about half of adults use AI chatbots and 44% have used ChatGPT (Pew, 2026). Worldwide, ChatGPT sends 80.48% of AI chatbot referrals (StatCounter).
Which websites do ChatGPT and AI Overviews cite most?
In Google AI Overviews, YouTube (22.9%), Reddit (18.5%) and Facebook (10.1%) have the largest citation shares (Ahrefs, September 2026). Across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, earned media makes up 84% of citations (Muck Rack), and listicles are the most-cited page type at 21.9% (Wix Studio). ChatGPT's Reddit citations dropped 88% in six months, so these shares can move quickly.
Does ranking on Google help you get cited by AI?
It helps, though less than it used to. Ahrefs found that 37.9% of AI Overview citations rank in the top 10, down from about 76% in July 2025, and BrightEdge puts the overlap near 17%. For ChatGPT, AirOps found that 43.2% of pages ranking #1 on Google get cited, 3.5x the rate for pages beyond the top 20.
Should I block AI crawlers or add an llms.txt file?
Blocking may not keep you out of AI answers, since about 75% of news sites that block OpenAI or Google AI bots still appear in AI citations (BuzzStream). Platforms differ a lot in what they give back: Cloudflare measured Anthropic crawling 25,000 to 100,000 pages per visit referred, compared with 3 to 30 for Google. An llms.txt file is optional, and 97% of the files Ahrefs tracked got zero traffic in May 2026.
Does traffic from AI search convert better?
The evidence is thin so far. The popular 15.9% conversion figure comes from a single client case study, so we left it out. Profound found that an AI mention lifts visits to a brand's site 1.5x to 2.5x over the next 7 days, while only about 2.5% of those visits carry an AI tag, so AI's effect on conversions is easy to undercount.
Want to keep learning? Read our SEO statistics hub, our SEO vs PPC statistics and our B2B SEO statistics.
