AI Search Statistics 2026: AI Overviews, Clicks and Citations

Pick the share that matches your keyword set before you size the risk. The share moves with query type, device and the month of the sample.

Conductor counted AI Overviews on 25.11% of unique Google searches from September 15 to October 12, 2025.

Ahrefs found AI Overviews on 20.5% of desktop SERPs in September 2025, across 146 million results. Seer found them on about 36% of informational queries in its 2026 update.

The gap comes from the query mix. Ahrefs found that 99.9% of keywords that trigger an AI Overview have informational intent. Seer found about 8% of commercial queries and about 5% of transactional queries show one.

Ahrefs also found AI Overviews on 24.9% of non-branded queries, against 13.1% of branded queries. A brand-heavy keyword list will understate your exposure.

Tag your target queries by intent, word count and brand term. Measure the share with an AI Overview in each group, and quote the study whose query mix matches yours.

Read click loss by position, not as one site-wide number. The loss is largest at the top of the page and shrinks as rank falls.

Pew's March 2025 panel found users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% of visits without one. Users clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of those visits.

Ahrefs compared desktop CTR on keywords with an AI Overview. Position 1 fell from 0.073 in December 2023 to 0.016 in December 2025. Its position table shows a 58.0% drop at position 1 and a 19.4% drop at position 10.

Seer's full-year 2025 informational averages show 2.07% organic CTR when the brand is cited in the AI Overview, 0.94% when it is not cited, and 3.35% with no AI Overview.

Seer also found 35% more organic clicks for brands cited in an AI Overview. Seer says it cannot prove that citation causes the lift, so treat the lift as a correlation.

Google disputes the Pew design. A Google spokesperson said the study uses a flawed methodology and a skewed query set that does not represent Search traffic.

Use each study for one decision. Use Pew for user behavior, the Ahrefs position table for rank-level planning, and Seer for the value of a citation.

Use zero-click rates as levels for one panel. Do not chart them as one trend line across studies.

Pew found an AI summary on 18% of the Google searches in its March 2025 study. Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% of pages with only traditional results.

SparkToro's 2024 study, on a Datos panel, found 58.5% of US Google searches ended in zero clicks; its 2026 report restates 2024 as 60.45% from Datos. SparkToro's 2026 report uses a Similarweb panel and found 68.01% of US searches ended without a click from January to April 2026. Its author calls the Datos and Similarweb panels apples and oranges, so the two years are not directly comparable.

Semrush's clickstream study of AI Mode found 92-94% of AI Mode searches were zero-click. On average, 6-8% of AI Mode sessions led to a visit to an external domain. Semrush's comparison puts zero-click at about 34% without an AI Overview and about 43% with one. It warns that these come from separate studies with different methods and timeframes.

Similarweb found that the share of news-related Google searches ending with no click rose from 56% in May 2024 to 69% in May 2025. Organic visits to news sites fell from over 2.3 billion at the mid-2024 peak to under 1.7 billion.

If you publish news, track no-click share by query type every quarter. If you sell a service, track clicks on your own query set against your own baseline. For classic click data by position, read the SEO statistics page.

Expect AI referral to be a small share of your traffic. Check the sample before you set a target.

Ahrefs found AI sends 0.1% of total referral traffic, across about 35,000 websites in March 2025. Google sent 345 times more traffic than ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini combined.

Smaller sites get a larger share from AI. Ahrefs found sites under 10,000 visits get 0.3% of traffic from LLMs, against 0.1% for sites over 1 million visits.

Ahrefs' March 2026 tracker of 74,752 websites put all AI chatbots at 0.28% of total web traffic. ChatGPT was the largest source by a wide margin.

SE Ranking found AI platforms at 0.32% of all website traffic in 2026, up from 0.24% in 2025, across 101,574 websites.

Conductor found AI referral at 1.08% of all website traffic across 13,770 domains in 10 key industries, and ChatGPT made up 87.4% of that AI referral traffic. Conductor excludes AI Mode, which Google Analytics groups with organic search.

Crawling is a separate cost. Cloudflare Radar shows Anthropic at 38,065.7 pages crawled per referred visit in July 2025, down from 286,930.1 in January. Google rose from 3.8 to 5.4 pages per referred visit over the same months.

Ahrefs' own site is one data point. AI search visitors were 0.5% of its visitors but drove 12.1% of signups, a 23 times higher conversion rate than organic search.

Set AI referral targets from your own analytics, and benchmark them against the study closest to your site size. Ahrefs warns that some AI traffic shows as direct, so AI referral counts are likely low.

Plan citations by platform and by time window. The top domains change within months, so a single list goes stale fast.

Ahrefs found 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the top 10 SERP blocks, and 31.2% ranked 11 to 100. The share of AI Overview citations from the original SERP fell from about 76% in July 2025 to about 38% in March 2026.

Mention share differs by platform. Ahrefs' June 2025 Brand Radar data put Wikipedia at 16.3% of ChatGPT mentions and 12.5% of Perplexity mentions. YouTube led Perplexity at 16.1%.

Semrush's weekly snapshots show how fast the mix moves. Reddit appeared in close to 60% of ChatGPT responses in early August 2025, and in around 10% by mid-September. A Semrush analyst attributes the main part of that drop to ChatGPT avoiding over-citing certain websites.

Similarweb's January and February 2026 panel put Wikipedia at 13.15% and Reddit at 11.97% of ChatGPT web browsing citations.

Ahrefs found branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 with AI Overview brand mentions, against 0.218 for backlinks, across 75,000 brands. Ahrefs notes that correlation is not causation.

The top quartile of brands by web mentions averages 169 AI Overview mentions, against 14 for the next quartile down.

Track which domains each platform cites for your own prompts every month. In this data, brand mentions correlate more strongly than backlinks do. The GEO and AEO guide covers how to earn these citations.

Size your audience by platform and by question. Each survey defines use in its own way.

Pew's June 2026 report found 44% of US adults use ChatGPT. Adults under 50 are about twice as likely as adults 50 and older to use it, at 57% against 28%.

About a quarter of US adults use chatbots daily. Pew counts 12% who use them several times a day and 4% who use them almost constantly.

Information searching is among the most common uses of chatbots, along with work tasks. Pew found 38% of employed adults use them for tasks at work.

Pew found 63% of men and 57% of women read AI summaries at the top of search results.

Pew's teen survey found 64% of US teens aged 13 to 17 use AI chatbots, and 57% have used them to search for information.

Alphabet said in July 2025 that AI Overviews had over 2 billion monthly users in more than 200 countries and territories. Its Q2 2025 remarks gave AI Mode over 100 million monthly users in the US and India, and the Gemini app more than 450 million. In May 2026, Google said AI Mode had surpassed one billion monthly users.

The Reuters Institute found weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose to 10% globally in 2026, from 7% a year earlier, across 45 markets. Weekly use was 17% among the youngest respondents and 5% among the oldest.

Datos reported that Google held over 90% of desktop search in the US and EU/UK in Q4 2025. AI tool visits reached 0.77% of US desktop activity by December 2025.

For reach, use Pew for the share of US adults, Alphabet for platform scale and Datos for desktop share. Do not compare a survey share with a user count.

Match each number to the metric you track. Do not combine two studies into one figure.

In August 2025, Google said total organic click volume from Google Search to websites had been relatively stable year over year. Google also says AI Overviews drive over 10% more queries for the query types that show them. The studies above measure click-through when an AI Overview shows. Both statements can hold.

Pick the study by the metric you need, not by the headline number.

Name the study and its metric in every citation. A figure without its metric is hard to defend.

Widely repeated numbers without an original source should stay out of your reports, even when roundup posts repeat them. Each claim below has a specific problem.

• A forecast from 2024 that traditional search volume would fall by a set share by 2026. No primary release states it, and later Datos panel data shows Google still holds most desktop search.
• A share of queries with AI Overviews credited to Semrush for March 2025. No Semrush page states it.
• A share of queries with AI Overviews credited to BrightEdge. The public BrightEdge release covers AI agent traffic, not AI Overview coverage.
• A Wikipedia share of ChatGPT citations credited to Profound. Its sample size appears two different ways, and it covers only a top-10 subset of domains.
• Semrush's June 2025 Reddit, Wikipedia and YouTube shares of ChatGPT citations. No Semrush page states them, and Semrush's own later series counts responses, not citations.
• An Adobe uplift in conversion rate and time on site for AI-referred retail visits. Adobe's release reports traffic growth from a modest base and does not include these uplifts.
• A Similarweb zero-click figure for searches with AI Overviews. No Similarweb page states it.
• A Seer match rate between SearchGPT citations and Bing's top results. No Seer page states it.
• An Ahrefs share of searches with AI Overviews that circulates in aggregator posts. Ahrefs' own pages give a different measure: the share of desktop SERPs.
• A 2022 Semrush zero-click study. It predates AI Overviews, and its desktop and mobile figures do not reconcile.
• A platform split of AI referrals from an older Ahrefs study. It predates the SE Ranking 2026 platform split.
• A monthly user count for AI Overviews from 2026 event coverage, not from a Google page. Use the Alphabet figure from July 2025 instead.

For the reading order by goal, start at the SEO guide.