Statistics
AI search statistics (2026)
Every number on this page was checked on its source page on 28 October 2026, and each one links to that page. Where a study is repeated, the newest version is used. The last group is our own data from running SeeRanked on its own category on 23 October 2026: 16 buyer prompts about AI visibility tools, asked in New York, London and Dubai on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity, 240 answers in all. Brand names were taken from each answer the way the methodology describes. The full sheet is not published yet; email support@seeranked.com for a copy.
We update this page monthly. If a number has moved, the source link shows the newest figure.
What AI assistants cite
- Across 30 million cited sources on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, Reddit was the first or second most-cited domain on every assistant. (Source: Peec AI, )
- In September 2026, ChatGPT spread 5.7 million citations so widely that the 50 most-cited domains earned only 8.4% of them. (Source: Surfer, )
- In September 2026, g2.com was the third most-cited domain in ChatGPT with 21,077 citations; capterra.com ranked 19th with 9,001. (Source: Surfer, )
- ChatGPT cited Reddit in close to 60% of responses in early August 2025, then in around 10% by mid-September, across more than 230,000 prompts. (Source: Semrush, )
- Within ChatGPT’s ten most-cited sources, Wikipedia takes nearly half (47.9%) of the citations, across 680 million citations from August 2024 to June 2025. (Source: Profound, )
- Across 1,056,727 AI citations, listicles took 21.9%, articles 16.7% and product pages 13.7%; comparison and alternative pages drew under 3%. (Source: Wix Studio AI Search Lab, )
- 40% of commercial queries cite a listicle, nearly double other intents, and 80.9% of those listicle citations go to third-party lists rather than a brand’s own. (Source: Wix Studio AI Search Lab, )
- Comparison pages earned 1.87 citations per retrieval, 45% above the 1.29 average, yet only 4.1% of all citations, across 25,337 citations from April to July 2026. (Source: DeltaV Digital, )
- Across 17 million citations, AI assistants cite URLs 25.7% fresher than organic results; ChatGPT’s are 458 days newer, Google AI Overviews’ 16 days older. (Source: Ahrefs, )
What makes a brand visible to AI
- Across 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlate 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, branded anchors 0.527, backlinks only 0.218. (Source: Ahrefs, )
- YouTube mentions show the strongest correlation with AI visibility, about 0.737, ahead of branded web mentions, across 75,000 brands on ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews. (Source: Ahrefs, )
- Gartner Peer Insights, G2, Capterra, Software Advice and TrustRadius together account for 88% of all review-platform citations in Google AI Overviews. (Source: SE Ranking, )
- 34.5% of Google AI Overviews for commercial keywords cited at least one review platform, across 22,729 AI Overviews from 30,000 keywords. (Source: SE Ranking, )
- Claude’s cited web-search results overlapped 86.7% (13 of 15) with Brave Search’s top non-sponsored results, pointing to Brave as its search backend. (Source: Profound, )
AI crawlers and the technical side
- In July 2025, Anthropic crawled 38,000 pages for every visit it referred back, OpenAI 1,091, Perplexity 195 and Microsoft about 41. (Source: Cloudflare, )
- Training now drives nearly 80% of AI bot activity, up from 72% a year earlier; GPTBot’s share of AI and search crawler traffic grew from 4.7% to 11.7% in a year. (Source: Cloudflare, )
- Of 3,816 top-10,000 domains with a readable robots.txt, 546 (about 14%) had rules aimed at AI bots; GPTBot was the most blocked, disallowed by 312 domains. (Source: Cloudflare, )
- Throughout 2025, AI bots accounted for an average of 4.2% of HTML requests; Googlebot alone originated 4.5%. (Source: Cloudflare, )
- Over 2.5 million websites have disallowed AI training through managed robots.txt or crawler-blocking rules on one network alone. (Source: Cloudflare, )
- AI crawlers fetch JavaScript files in 11.5% (ChatGPT) and 23.84% (Claude) of requests, but none of the major AI crawlers render JavaScript. (Source: Vercel, )
- GPTBot made 569 million requests and Claude 370 million on one hosting network in a single month; four AI crawlers together made nearly 1.3 billion. (Source: Vercel, )
- In a 90-day test, only 84 of more than 62,100 AI bot visits requested /llms.txt, about 0.1% of AI bot traffic. (Source: Otterly.AI, )
- Of nearly 300,000 domains analysed, only 10.13% had an llms.txt file, and having one showed no effect on how often a domain is cited by LLMs. (Source: SE Ranking, )
- In the week of 8 to 14 June 2026, OpenAI accounted for 94.8% of the verified AI crawler requests across the sites Promptwatch tracks. (Source: Promptwatch, )
- In a February 2026 citation sample, markdown files made up just 0.05% of everything cited, against 99.94% for HTML pages. (Source: Promptwatch, )
- Bots now account for 53% of all internet traffic, and bad bots alone for 40%, up 3% on the year. (Source: Thales (Imperva Bad Bot Report), )
How people use AI search
- AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users within a year of launch. (Source: Google, )
- 45% of US consumers used AI tools for local business recommendations in the past year, up from 6% the year before. (Source: BrightLocal, )
- 31% of US consumers used ChatGPT for a business recommendation in the last 12 months, more than any other AI tool. (Source: BrightLocal, )
- AI platforms sent websites an average of 770.7 million referral visits a month between June 2025 and May 2026, more than double the year before (+117.4%). (Source: Similarweb, )
- ChatGPT accounts for more than 80% of AI referral visits to the top 1,000 global domains. (Source: Similarweb, )
- The average visitor arriving from AI search is 4.4 times as valuable as the average organic search visitor, based on conversion rate. (Source: Semrush, )
- For digital-marketing and SEO topics, AI search may send websites more visitors than traditional search by early 2028. (Source: Semrush, )
What AI answers do to clicks and rankings
- Google users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% of visits without one. (Source: Pew Research Center, )
- When an AI Overview appears, the top-ranking page’s average click-through rate is 34.5% lower. (Source: Ahrefs, )
- Organic click-through rate on informational queries with an AI Overview fell 61% between June 2024 and September 2025; paid CTR fell 68%. (Source: Seer Interactive, )
- About 80% of consumers now rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches. (Source: Bain & Company, )
- Zero-click and AI answers are estimated to reduce organic web traffic by 15% to 25%. (Source: Bain & Company, )
- Only 1.74% of newly published pages reached Google’s top 10 within a year; 72.9% of the pages in the top 10 are more than three years old. (Source: Ahrefs, )
Our own data
- 81% of answers named at least one brand: 195 of 240 answers to 16 buyer prompts about AI visibility tools, asked in New York, London and Dubai on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Perplexity. (Source: SeeRanked, )
- The same prompt on the same assistant named exactly the same brands in all three cities in just 1 of 80 cases; in 5 more it named none in any city. (Source: SeeRanked, )
- All five assistants named the same brand first for only 3 of 48 prompt-and-city combinations (6%). (Source: SeeRanked, )
- An answer named 6.2 brands on average: Grok 8.7 and Claude 8.6, Gemini 7.1, ChatGPT 4.3, Perplexity 2.4. (Source: SeeRanked, )
- ChatGPT named no brand at all in 22 of its 48 answers (46%); Claude did so in 2 of 48. (Source: SeeRanked, )
- 389 different brands were named across the 240 answers; the most-named brand appeared in 46% of them, and none appeared in more than half. (Source: SeeRanked, )