AI search statistics 2026: AI Overviews, ChatGPT and citations

Usage of AI search and assistants

• AI Overviews have over 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages. (Google, July 2025)
• Google says AI Overviews drive over 10% more queries globally for the types of queries that show them. (Google, July 2025)
• AI Mode had over 100 million monthly active users in the US and India within weeks of launch. (Google, July 2025)
• The Gemini app had more than 450 million monthly active users, with daily requests up over 50% from the previous quarter. (Google, July 2025)
• Google was processing over 980 trillion monthly tokens across its products, up from 480 trillion in May 2025. (Google, July 2025)
• ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users. (OpenAI, February 2026)
• ChatGPT has more than 50 million consumer subscribers. (OpenAI, February 2026)

How AI summaries change clicks

• Users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 26% of pages with an AI summary ended the browsing session, against 16% of pages with only traditional results. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 58% of respondents ran at least one search that produced an AI summary in March 2025. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• Pew's study tracked 900 US adults and 68,879 unique Google searches. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• AI Overviews correlated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page. (Ahrefs, April 2025)
• Position 1 CTR for keywords that later showed AI Overviews fell from 0.073 in March 2024 to 0.026 in March 2025. (Ahrefs, April 2025)
• Position 1 CTR for informational keywords overall fell from 0.056 to 0.031 over the same year. (Ahrefs, April 2025)
• 99.2% of keywords that trigger AI Overviews have informational intent, per Ahrefs research cited in the study. (Ahrefs, April 2025)
• The study analysed 300,000 keywords, half with an AI Overview present. (Ahrefs, April 2025)
• Around two-thirds of all searches in Pew's study ended with the user browsing elsewhere on Google or leaving the site. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)

When AI summaries appear

• 18% of Google searches in Pew's study generated an AI summary. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• Just 8% of one or two-word searches produced an AI summary. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 53% of searches with 10 words or more produced an AI summary. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 60% of searches beginning with a question word produced an AI summary. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 36% of searches including both a noun and a verb produced an AI summary. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop results for branded keywords by late September 2026. (Ahrefs, 2026)
• Non-branded keywords averaged 78.3% AI Overview presence in September 2026. (Ahrefs, 2026)
• Among AI Overviews on brand-name queries, 76.2% appeared in position one. (Ahrefs, 2026)
• Branded keywords' AI Overview presence rose from a 61.3% monthly average in July 2026 to 73.3% in September. (Ahrefs, 2026)
• For 100 of the world's best-known brand names, AI Overviews went from 5 of 98 results in early July 2026 to 63 of 100 by 30 September. (Ahrefs, 2026)

What AI summaries look like

• The median AI summary was 67 words long; the shortest was 7 and the longest 369. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 88% of AI summaries cited three or more sources; only 1% cited a single source. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit made up 15% of sources in AI summaries and 17% in standard results. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• 6% of AI summary sources were .gov websites, against 2% of standard search results. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)
• News sites made up 5% of sources in both AI summaries and standard results. (Pew Research Center, July 2025)

Which pages AI engines cite

• 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 results blocks. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• 31.2% of AI Overview-cited URLs ranked 11 to 100, and 31.0% beyond the top 100. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• The share of AI Overview citations from the original top 10 fell from about 76% in July 2025 to about 38%, with a changed methodology. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• YouTube URLs made up 5.6% of all AI Overview citations, and YouTube citations grew 34% in six months. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• The 2026 analysis covered 863,000 keyword results pages and 4 million AI Overview URLs. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• Only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot appear in Google's top 10 for the same query. (Ahrefs, August 2025)
• Perplexity was the outlier: 28.6% of its citations were in Google's top 10. (Ahrefs, August 2025)
• About 80% of AI assistant citations don't rank anywhere in Google for the original query. (Ahrefs, August 2025)
• Wikipedia had a 16.3% mention share in ChatGPT, 12.5% in Perplexity and 8.4% in AI Overviews. (Ahrefs, June 2025)
• YouTube had a 16.1% mention share in Perplexity and 9.5% in AI Overviews. (Ahrefs, June 2025)
• Reddit had a 7.4% mention share in AI Overviews, and Quora 3.6%. (Ahrefs, June 2025)
• Wikipedia was cited in 71.9% of branded AI Overviews with source lists in a 100-brand panel. (Ahrefs, 2026)
• Counting standard blue links only, 37.10% of AI Overview-cited URLs ranked in the top 10 and 36.70% didn't rank in the top 100. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• 18.2% of AI Overview-cited pages that didn't rank in Google's top 100 were YouTube URLs. (Ahrefs, March 2026)
• About 10% of AI assistant citations appear in Bing's top 10 for the same query, and about 11% in either Google's or Bing's. (Ahrefs, August 2025)
• 8% of ChatGPT's in-text citations appeared in Google's top 10 for the query. (Ahrefs, August 2025)
• In branded AI Overviews, YouTube was cited in 38.6% and LinkedIn in 22.8% of source lists. (Ahrefs, 2026)
• Only 3.4% of branded AI Overview answers explicitly discussed competitors. (Ahrefs, 2026)

What makes content more visible in AI answers

• Adding citations, quotations and statistics improved a source's visibility in generative engine answers by up to about 40% in the GEO paper's benchmark. (Aggarwal et al. (arXiv), 2023)
• Keyword stuffing did not improve visibility in generated answers in the same research. (Aggarwal et al. (arXiv), 2023)

Who lets AI crawlers in (our crawl)

From our crawl of 508 directories and software companies. Full data in our llms.txt and AI crawler statistics.

Source: AgentLaunch crawl of robots.txt and llms.txt, October 2026.

• 59% of the well-known software and AI companies we crawled publish an llms.txt file.
• 47% of live startup directories publish an llms.txt file.
• 9% of startup directories fully block GPTBot, but under 1% block OAI-SearchBot, the crawler for ChatGPT search.
• Bytespider is the most-blocked AI crawler among the directories we crawled.