# The Numbers — AI Search Statistics 2026

The load-bearing statistics of the AI-search industry, each dated and sourced. Every figure appeared in a published wire item and was verified against its source.

## Common questions

**What percentage of Google searches have an AI Overview?** 43% of Google searches surfaced an AI Overview in July 2026, per a Similarweb analysis — up from 15% a year earlier. That figure is the single most-quoted number on this beat and it moved by nearly threefold in twelve months, which is why every statistic here carries its date.

**What is AI search market share?** No single credible market-share figure exists, and treating one as authoritative is the most common error in this category. What the record does support: 95% of ChatGPT's 494 million users also used Google search during the same March-to-May 2026 span, per Similarweb — AI search is so far additive rather than substitutive. Separately, 40% of U.S. Google searches sent a click to the open web in June 2026, a record low.

**Are AI answers costing publishers traffic?** Where it has been measured, yes, and unevenly. People Inc. reported a 40% year-over-year decline in Google search traffic; Blood Cancer UK reported a 53% drop in page views for its leukaemia information page. But 22.4% of AI Overview citation clicks are misattributed to Direct instead of Organic Search in GA4, so some reported loss is instrumentation rather than behaviour. Check the attribution before believing the decline.

**Where do these AI search statistics come from?** Every figure on this page appeared first in a published wire item and was verified against its source then. Each carries the source's own date rather than ours, vendor-published studies are labelled as such, and a figure that has been replaced keeps its prior value visible rather than being overwritten.

## Who gets cited

- **74%** — Share of its cited sources ChatGPT Search replaces every week, against 56% for Google, across 82,619 prompts re-sampled weekly for 17 weeks (1,548,213 snapshots, six countries) in a SISTRIX study — with a stable core of a few domains present for 86% of prompts and everything outside it rotating at 89% per week. (SISTRIX, 2026-05; SISTRIX study — vendor-published, not replicated; window closed 2026-04-08, before later model changes) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-01-sistrix-chatgpt-replaces-74-of-its-cited-sources-every-week/
- **83%** — Share of the time Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode cite different domains for the same prompt, per SISTRIX — two surfaces from one company that agree on source selection less than a fifth of the time, so a citation-share number measured on one is not a reading of the other. (SISTRIX, 2026-05; SISTRIX study — vendor-published, not replicated; window closed 2026-04-08, before later model changes) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-01-sistrix-chatgpt-replaces-74-of-its-cited-sources-every-week/
- **1.4%** — Share of news articles cited as sources that remained permanently in the citation set across 17 weeks of weekly re-sampling, per SISTRIX — for a publisher an AI citation behaves less like an asset that accrues than a placement that expires. By contrast, 43% of brand queries kept the brand's own domain present in all 17 weeks while its co-citations rotated at 70% per week. (SISTRIX, 2026-05; SISTRIX study — vendor-published, not replicated; window closed 2026-04-08, before later model changes) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-01-sistrix-chatgpt-replaces-74-of-its-cited-sources-every-week/
- **21.1%** — YouTube's mention share in Google AI Overviews — the most-cited domain, ahead of Reddit (18.5%), Facebook (10.7%), Google itself (7.1%) and Instagram (5.8%). (Ahrefs, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-23-ahrefs-ranks-the-50-most-cited-domains-across-four-ai-surfaces/
- **#2** — Google's own rank among the most-cited domains in AI Mode answers, driven by Google-hosted Business Profile and Product Knowledge Panel cards. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-23-google-is-ai-mode-s-second-most-cited-domain-new-data-shows/
- **89.3%** — Share of estimated ChatGPT search demand sitting in categories with no single clearly leading brand — only 15.2% of 1,094 categories analyzed have one, per a Kevin Indig analysis of six months of Semrush citation data; the most-cited domain matched the most-mentioned brand only 20.8% of the time. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-29-analysis-most-ai-search-demand-still-has-no-clear-chatgpt-category/
- **76%** — Share of AI Mode passages reused 100 or more times that come from pages already ranking #1 organically, per a Pillarbase study of 15.7 million citations; the most-recycled passages average 117 words, answer in the first sentence about 80% of the time, and are self-contained about 85% of the time. (Search Engine Land, 2026-07; Pillarbase study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-29-pillarbase-study-15-7-million-ai-mode-citations-show-what-google/
- **52%** — Perplexity's rate of "ghost citations" — pulling from content without naming the source brand — the highest of seven engines Writesonic measured, followed by Google AI Mode (49%), AI Overviews (41%), ChatGPT (37%), Gemini (25%), Grok (22%) and Microsoft Copilot (19%), across roughly 16 million brand appearances. (Search Engine Land, 2026-07; Writesonic study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-29-writesonic-study-finds-ai-engines-often-skip-naming-source-brands/
- **3.2x** — How much more often AI models searched for brands they already knew versus unfamiliar ones (55.7% vs. 17.4%) across 66 U.S. buyer prompts tested on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude; 63% of brand-specific searches surfaced one of each model's five most-familiar brands. (Search Engine Land, 2026-07; geoSurge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-30-study-finds-ai-models-search-more-often-for-brands-they-already-know/
- **90%+** — Trust in an AI-generated answer when it cites a fully trusted news source, per an AOP/Ipsos survey of 1,000 UK adults — versus about 25% for a neutral source and roughly 10% for a distrusted one; 37% of respondents (45% among ages 45-54) didn't realize AI tools can fabricate sources. (Press Gazette AI, 2026-07; AOP-commissioned study — publisher trade body) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-01-study-ties-ai-answer-trust-directly-to-the-news-brands-it-cites/
- **15 of 20** — Verticals where Google AI Mode's citation mix shifted from publishers toward retailers over the 30 days ending July 15, 2026 — publisher mentions fell nearly in half while mentions of retailers like Home Depot and Wayfair roughly tripled and quadrupled respectively, per Kevin Indig's Growth Memo analysis of the Search Signals Index; AI Mode's overall mention volume contracted 12.9% over the same window while AI Overviews held flat. (Growth Memo (Kevin Indig), 2026-08; Search Signals Index — Kevin Indig/Growth Memo analysis, self-published data) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-06-ai-mode-citation-mix-shifts-from-publishers-toward-retail-products/
- **72% vs. 42%** — Share of AI-cited pages that looked fresh by last-modified date versus by original publish date, among 4,124 pages with both dates in a Seer Interactive analysis of 47,097 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity — refreshed old pages outcited newly published ones. Overall, 75% of cited pages had been updated within the past year, 88% within two years; recency requirements varied by engine (Gemini 78%, ChatGPT 73%, Perplexity 65%). (Seer Interactive, 2026-07; Seer Interactive study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-06-study-ties-ai-citation-likelihood-to-how-recently-a-page-was-updated/
- **17.1%** — UGC/community platforms' share of domains cited in ChatGPT answers to SaaS buying queries — more than four times publishers' 4.0% and ahead of review platforms (7.4% at discovery to 13.2% at evaluation) at every buyer-journey stage, with Wikipedia alone accounting for 10.1 to 14.0 of the 17.1 points, per a Growth Memo analysis of roughly 35,000 citation URLs tracked in Profound over December 2025. (Growth Memo (Kevin Indig), 2026-08; Growth Memo/Profound analysis — self-published data) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-10-ugc-platforms-outcite-review-sites-in-chatgpt-answers/
- **85th vs. 17th percentile** — Favorability percentile on OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Terra for real brands with positive- versus negative-sounding names in a controlled test, per a Peec AI analysis of 904 companies across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Copilot — well-known brands like Discord and Slack were unaffected. (Peec AI blog, 2026-08; Peec AI study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-11-study-ai-assistants-favor-brands-with-better-sounding-names/
- **33x** — Growth in Reddit's tracked search footprint between June 2025 and February 2026, with its AI citations up another 84% from February to July 2026 before plateauing at a level several times higher than a year earlier — Google AI Overviews drives roughly 88% of Reddit's citation volume, per a BrightEdge analysis using its AI Hyper Cube, Data Cube X and Expert Services datasets. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-16-brightedge-reddit-s-ai-citation-surge-has-plateaued-at-a-higher/
- **89% vs. ~80%** — Share of Google AI Overviews' Instagram Reels citations going to posted content (89%, and 53% for Facebook video) versus roughly 80% of ChatGPT's LinkedIn citations going to profile and company pages instead — the two engines pull from structurally different parts of the same social platforms, per a BrightEdge analysis of five platforms across nine industries over twelve weekly observations. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-16-study-finds-chatgpt-and-ai-overviews-cite-different-parts-of-social/
- **11%** — Share of brands referenced by AI answers that were named by all three of GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash and Claude Sonnet 4.6 in a Fractl analysis of 4,320 AI responses across 96 prompts — 77% were named by just one model. In the travel category, Booking.com led with 285 AI mentions ahead of Airbnb (227) and Expedia (215). (Search Engine Land, 2026-08; Fractl study — vendor-published, author is a Fractl co-founder) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-17-ai-models-agree-on-brand-visibility-only-11-of-the-time/
- **68.9% vs. 2.1%** — How often a brand ChatGPT itself named in its own search query reached the final answer (68.9%) versus a brand surfacing only on retrieved pages (2.1%) — a roughly 33x gap — per an independent traffic analysis of a ChatGPT Plus account across 27 conversations; only 3.1% of 3,554 retrieved pages earned a citation at all, with citation rates falling from 5.2% at the first-listed domain to 0.3% from the sixth position on. (PPC Land, 2026-08; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-chatgpt-s-own-search-queries-name-brands-users-never-typed/
- **~60%** — Business websites' share of citations in Gemini's local AI search results — nearly 60% of 14,472 citations across 1,487 queries in the 50 largest U.S. metros, with Reddit second at 13.7% — per a Steady Demand analysis. Identical queries returned overlapping sources only about 40% of the time and named the same top business in just 7% of repeat searches, versus roughly 90% listing consistency in Google's local pack; Gemini and ChatGPT cited the same domains for the same queries only 8% of the time. (Search Engine Land, 2026-08; Steady Demand study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-19-business-sites-dominate-gemini-s-local-ai-citations/
- **50% vs. 0.6%** — Share of Google AI Overviews' YouTube citations linking to a timestamped moment within the video, versus 0.6% for ChatGPT — Google also cites YouTube Shorts 17.5% of the time versus 1.1% for ChatGPT — per a BrightEdge analysis of cited YouTube URLs across nine industries over twelve weekly observations (May 17–Aug 2, 2026); BrightEdge says the pattern shows Google navigates within a video while ChatGPT cites it whole. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-20-google-and-chatgpt-cite-different-slices-of-the-same-youtube-video/
- **16x** — Growth in search volume behind top prompts citing Yahoo Finance in Google AI Overviews between January and July 2026 — versus just 1.1x growth in the number of distinct prompts — after AI Overviews expanded into the finance category in April 2026 and shifted volume toward ticker lookups; Yahoo's brand-mention share rose to roughly half of tracked mentions by July while Forbes, which led in January, fell by about a third, per a BrightEdge analysis. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-24-ai-overviews-finance-expansion-flipped-who-wins-ticker-queries/
- **62%** — Share of vendor-authored listicles that still gained estimated organic traffic even as Google's share of listicles holding position 1 fell from roughly 19-20% in January 2026 to about 15-16% in August — Google also shows roughly 4.5x more listicles for queries that explicitly ask for a list than for implicit category queries, per a Growth Memo analysis of 5.32 million Google result rows across 60,000 queries. (Growth Memo (Kevin Indig), 2026-08; Growth Memo/SE Ranking analysis — self-published data) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-25-google-s-listicle-demotion-is-targeted-not-universal/
- **56% lower odds** — Reduction in a listicle's odds of reaching the Google top 3 when it carries an old or unreadable publish date — the strongest predictor measured, ahead of author bios, schema markup and word count; counted listicles ("17 Best Tools") also beat unnumbered editorial roundups in 56.8% of head-to-head matchups, per a Growth Memo analysis of nearly 60,000 Google results pages. (Growth Memo (Kevin Indig), 2026-08; Growth Memo analysis — self-published data) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-31-freshness-outranks-word-count-in-google-s-listicle-rankings/
- **100%** — Recommendation rate for the well-known brand over an otherwise-identical rival product, testing GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet and Gemini on skincare recommendations — but a rival needed less than a 0.1-star ratings edge to overturn that advantage; when every brand adopted the same marketing tactics, the incumbent's edge collapsed from a payoff of +0.802 to +0.007, and brands that opted out received no recommendations at all, per an arXiv paper by Xi Chu and Yupeng Hou. (arXiv GEO, 2026-06; single skincare-category test — not verified across other verticals) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-25-llms-favor-well-known-brands-until-reviews-tip-the-scale/
- **86.4%** — Relative drop in Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations — an average 3.83% (July 18-Aug 7) down to 0.52% (Aug 14-17) — against just an 11.3% decline on Google AI Overviews (2.37% to 2.10%) and 30.5% on AI Mode over the same window, per Promptwatch. It attributes the ChatGPT-only break to an August 8 change that pushed use of the site: operator in ChatGPT's background search queries from 0.37% to 16.8%, and calls the decline provisional pending confirmation it isn't a data-collection issue. (Promptwatch, 2026-08; Promptwatch study — vendor-published and called provisional by its author) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-27-reddit-s-citation-drop-is-chatgpt-only-86-there-11-on-ai-overviews/
- **36-52%** — Exact word-match rate between a shopper's prompt and the brand named in Reddit-cited answers — 43.5-52.0% for restaurants and 36.4-49.6% for ecommerce across Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT, with a median of four brands per Reddit-cited answer — evidence Reddit citations skew toward comparison and purchase-decision prompts rather than top-of-funnel discovery, per a BrightEdge analysis spanning May 17-Aug 2, 2026 across nine industries. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-27-brightedge-reddit-citations-skew-to-brand-aware-ai-shoppers/
- **0 of 10** — ChatGPT's top five cited domains for health questions are all government agencies or hospital systems, with YouTube absent from its top ten, while Google AI Overviews' YouTube citations for health queries run 1.8x above their June level and outrank clinical sources; for finance questions, AI Overviews concentrates 51% of citations in its top source versus a 19/15/14/14/11% spread across ChatGPT's top five, which includes the smaller valuation platform SimplyWall.st, per a BrightEdge analysis using its AI Hyper Cube citation tracking. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-31-chatgpt-google-ai-overviews-split-on-health-authority-sources/
- **24.1%** — Product pages' share of citations in a Ten Speed analysis of 170 B2B buyer-evaluation prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini (7,387 citation appearances, tracked via Peec AI) — the largest single category, ahead of blog/PR content (17.4%) and comparison pages/listicles (about 13% each); Reddit, YouTube and forums combined for just 4.2%. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-09; Ten Speed study — vendor-published; SEJ's own review found the comparison descriptive only, without statistical testing, and a prompt-count discrepancy (220 vs. 170) the vendor had to correct) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-03-ten-speed-product-pages-draw-24-of-ai-citations-reddit-4/

## Traffic and money

- **67.5% vs. 27%** — Share of Google traffic reaching news publishers via Discover versus Web Search in Q4 2025, across 400+ publishers tracked by NewzDash — reversed from 2023, when Search sent 51% and Discover 37%. NewzDash CEO John Shehata calls it "the Great Flip." Discover carries no queries, so most of a news publisher's Google traffic now arrives from a surface with nothing to optimize a keyword against. (Advanced Web Ranking, 2025-12; NewzDash analysis — vendor-published, not independently replicated; Q4 2025 data) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-01-google-discover-now-sends-news-publishers-more-than-twice-what-search/
- **3-5% vs. 40-50%** — How often AI Overviews trigger on US breaking and political news queries versus health queries, per John Shehata — with sports around 18%. Exposure to AI answers is a property of the beat rather than of news as a category, so a single figure for "news" averages desks in materially different businesses. (Advanced Web Ranking, 2026-01; NewzDash analysis — vendor-published, not independently replicated; Q4 2025 data) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-01-google-discover-now-sends-news-publishers-more-than-twice-what-search/
- **billions** — Weekly clicks Google says its AI Search features send to websites — a claim published without methodology, against third-party studies showing CTR declines. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07; no methodology published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-20-google-claims-ai-search-sends-billions-of-clicks-weekly-without-the/
- **$63.27B** — Alphabet's Q2 2026 Search revenue, up 17% year over year — the first deceleration after four quarters of accelerating growth. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-23-alphabet-q2-search-revenue-up-17-as-growth-eases/
- **1 in 3** — Commercial-keyword AI Mode queries showing ads in a July analysis — while advertisers were rarely among the answer's cited sources. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-23-ads-appear-on-a-third-of-commercial-ai-mode-queries-analysis-finds/
- **25.94%** — Share of more than 50,000 commercial ChatGPT prompts across 20 niches that showed ads, per an SE Ranking study — with 14.35% of those ads unrelated to the surrounding conversation, and only 3.63% of advertisers whose ads ran also cited as a source in the answer above them. (Search Engine Land, 2026-08; SE Ranking study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-11-chatgpt-ads-appear-on-a-quarter-of-commercial-prompts/
- **40%** — Share of U.S. Google searches that sent a click to the open web in June 2026 (40.7% in the EU/UK) — a record low — while Google AI Mode held at just 0.13% of U.S. search-related visits, per Datos and SparkToro's Q2 State of Search report. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-08; Datos/SparkToro study — cited via Search Engine Journal, methodology not published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-03-zero-click-google-searches-hit-a-record-high-ai-mode-use-stays-flat/
- **40%** — Year-over-year decline in People Inc.'s Google search traffic — now 21% of its total traffic, down from 25% the prior quarter, with core sessions off 22% YoY — even as the publisher's CEO says it won't block Google's AI crawlers because that "would turn off search." (Digiday, 2026-08) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-04-people-inc-won-t-block-google-s-ai-crawlers-despite-traffic-slide/
- **3x** — Year-over-year growth in AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify merchant stores in Q2 2026, per Shopify president Harley Finkelstein — with half of AI-referred sessions landing directly on product pages, 2.5x the rate of traditional search, while traditional search sessions stayed up 1.3x over two years. Shopify frames AI as additive to search, not a replacement. (TechCrunch AI, 2026-08; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-05-shopify-says-ai-driven-traffic-and-orders-tripled-year-over-year-in-q2/
- **72%** — Share of U.S. holiday shoppers who say they regularly or occasionally consult AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for gift ideas, with 49% doing so regularly — per an Optimove survey of 648 U.S. consumers; 37% cited data privacy as the top barrier to using AI tools more, even though nearly three-quarters trust AI-generated recommendations as much as or more than other sources. (PPC Land, 2026-08; Optimove survey — vendor-published, n=648) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-05-survey-72-of-holiday-shoppers-now-consult-ai-chatbots-for-gift-ideas/
- **21%** — Google's share of foundation model API revenue as of December 2025, with Google, OpenAI and Anthropic together controlling 88% — cited in an amicus brief urging the D.C. Circuit to toughen, not weaken, the remedy in Google's search antitrust appeal. (PPC Land, 2025-12; figure as cited in an advocacy brief, not independently verified) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-08-amicus-brief-urges-d-c-circuit-to-toughen-google-s-ai-antitrust-remedy/
- **53%** — Blood Cancer UK's year-over-year drop in page views for its leukaemia information page, with declines of 17-45% across its other blood cancer pages and community-forum visits up 86% over the same span, per Press Gazette; Save the Children logged a 303% YoY rise in AI Overview appearances in July 2026 while clicks and impressions fell, and the Brain Tumour Charity reported a roughly 27% site-wide traffic drop. (PPC Land, 2026-08; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-17-uk-charities-report-steep-traffic-losses-to-google-ai-overviews/
- **60%** — Rise in Perplexity's India revenue from February through mid-August 2026 versus the period when its free 12-month Pro offer via Airtel was still available — usage has settled near 14 million monthly active users, still about 5x pre-deal levels, even as new downloads fell 90% after redemptions closed in January 2026, per Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch. (TechCrunch AI, 2026-08; Sensor Tower estimate via TechCrunch — not Perplexity-reported) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-perplexity-s-india-revenue-rose-60-after-airtel-offer-ended/
- **58%** — Drop in Google AI Overviews' position-1 click-through rate in 2026, up from a 34.5% drop in 2025, per an Ahrefs analysis spanning roughly 15 million data points. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-08; Ahrefs study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-ahrefs-study-llms-txt-files-mostly-unread-by-ai-crawlers/
- **22.4%** — Average share of Google AI Overview citation-click traffic misattributed to the Direct channel instead of Organic Search in GA4, per a nine-month tracking study of 51,200 clicks across 1,661 AI Overview-cited snippets — worst in May 2026 at 29.3%. The same tracking found AI Overviews drove 7.53% of organic sessions overall, peaking at 16-17% in February-March 2026 before falling to 2-4% by August. (Search Engine Land, 2026-08; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-study-finds-ai-overview-traffic-misattributed-22-of-time/
- **39% vs. 24%** — Share of observed US ChatGPT ad placements going to retail and fashion queries versus their 24% share of query volume, per an Adthena analysis of nearly 850,000 US and UK AI search queries from March to May 2026 — ads overall appeared on 4.47% of US queries at 1.06 items per response, below the 3.53-item average Adthena measured on Google's AI surfaces; logistics (12.41%), home-and-garden (11.99%) and beauty (10.03%) had the highest per-category ad frequency. (PPC Land, 2026-08; Adthena study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-24-retail-takes-39-of-chatgpt-ad-slots-on-24-of-queries/
- **$1B annualized** — ChatGPT Ads' annualized revenue run rate, reached in under 200 days after launch, per OpenAI — a self-reported, unaudited figure. OpenAI opened self-service Ads Manager access to India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa the same day, previously a managed-sales and partner-led market. (OpenAI News, 2026-08; OpenAI-reported figure — annualized run rate, not audited revenue) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-31-chatgpt-ads-reaches-1-billion-annualized-revenue-run-rate/
- **23%** — Share of AI-referred shoppers who switch to a competitor when the AI-recommended website disappoints them — 16% abandon the purchase outright and only 3% buy anyway — per a Contentsquare survey of 2,000 US and French consumers; 21% said they'd seen AI-provided product information contradict what a brand's own website showed. (PPC Land, 2026-09; Contentsquare survey — vendor-published; fieldwork dates and margin of error undisclosed) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-02-contentsquare-poor-sites-push-ai-shoppers-toward-rivals/
- **21.6% higher** — How much higher Google AI Mode's shown prices ran versus the same items in Search's product carousel, per a Productrise study of 2 million-plus product listings tracked August 9-31, 2026 — the two surfaces showed the identical product on only 1.28% of matched queries, and listed a different lead seller 49.6% of the time when products did match. Google told Search Engine Journal all its shopping surfaces draw on the same Shopping Graph data but did not address the price or seller gap. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-09; Productrise study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-03-google-ai-mode-shows-higher-prices-than-search-study-finds/
- **2% to 13%** — Financial services' share of total US ChatGPT ad spend, April to August 2026, as the category grew from one top-100 advertiser to four of the top ten spenders — while shopping and retail's share fell from 37% to 21% over the same span, per Sensor Tower. Ad density (ads shown per user per hour) rose 163% over the period, averaging 26% monthly growth, with roughly 1,200 unique advertisers active by August. (PPC Land, 2026-09; Sensor Tower study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-03-financial-services-surges-into-chatgpt-s-top-ad-spenders/
- **6% to 24%** — Share of hotel-related ChatGPT prompts carrying a sponsored link, March to May 2026 — a fourfold increase in three months — per Comscore, which began tracking sponsored ChatGPT links using opt-in panel data on real prompts rather than synthetic tests. Panel size and composition undisclosed. (PPC Land, 2026-09; Comscore data — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-03-comscore-sponsored-chatgpt-ads-hit-24-of-hotel-prompts/
- **8% to 62%** — Feed-integrated retrieval's single-day jump in ChatGPT Shopping mode product recommendations on July 10, 2026 — the day ChatGPT 5.6 shipped — reaching roughly 65% of recommendations by late August and overtaking web search as the leading source, per a Profound analysis of 687 customers. Top-10 merchants' share of shopping-mode product cards rose from 22.5% to 41.8% over the same period. (Profound, 2026-09; Profound — vendor's own product data, not independent research) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-03-chatgpt-shopping-mode-feed-retrieval-overtakes-web-search/
- **47%** — Decline in search-referral traffic to mid-sized regional publishers, December 2024 to December 2025 — roughly double the decline measured at larger national outlets — per industry data cited in the Seattle Times and Newsday's joint copyright and trademark-dilution complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft. (Chat GPT Is Eating the World, 2025-12; figure as cited in a litigation complaint — underlying study and methodology not identified) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-05-seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-over-ai-use/
- **1.20% to 1.55%** — Google Shopping ads' median click-through rate, mid-2025 to mid-2026, even as impressions fell from roughly 1.85 million to 1.4 million — the inverse of the "crocodile effect" seen in organic search, where AI Overviews have lifted impressions while cutting clicks. Analysis of 175 billion impressions by Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce; Google has not confirmed his theory that AI Overviews are increasingly served on lower-click-probability queries. (Search Engine Roundtable, 2026-09; Smarter Ecommerce study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-07-google-shopping-ads-ctr-climbs-as-ai-overviews-cuts-impressions/

## What people ask

- **14.65M** — Conversations in Google's AI & Economy ATLAS report, which found AI questions about government services occur roughly 20x more often than time spent on them would predict. (Google / Search Engine Journal, 2026-07; vendor study) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-25-google-study-finds-ai-mode-and-gemini-queries-skew-toward-high/
- **~50%** — Share of medical, legal, financial and government queries to Google's AI surfaces arriving outside work hours — high-friction tasks, handled at night and on weekends. (Google / Search Engine Journal, 2026-07; vendor study) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-25-google-study-finds-ai-mode-and-gemini-queries-skew-toward-high/
- **19.2%** — Share of ChatGPT conversations carrying commercial intent as of June 2026, up from 13.9% a year earlier — weekly commercial conversations grew from roughly 243 million to 533 million over the same span, a pace Profound says puts ChatGPT near 28 billion commercial conversations a year. Automotive (59.1%) and travel/hospitality (56.1%) topped the industry list; education and non-profit topics were lowest at near 6%. (Profound research blog, 2026-08; Profound study — vendor's own product data, not independent research) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-chatgpt-commercial-conversations-nearly-double-in-a-year/

## Readiness and adoption

- **15.6%** — Average share of AI retrievability and trust criteria met by 71 audited small businesses — and 17% had no AI-retrievable digital presence at all. (Search Engine Land, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-24-audit-finds-most-small-businesses-invisible-to-ai-search-verification/
- **137,000** — Domains in Ahrefs' llms.txt adoption analysis — the dataset behind its free llms.txt generator. (Ahrefs, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-24-ahrefs-launches-a-free-llms-txt-generator-tool/
- **97%** — Share of sites' llms.txt files AI crawlers never read at all, per a separate Ahrefs analysis spanning roughly 15 million data points — which also found adding schema markup produced no measurable lift in AI citations across 1,885 pages tested over 30 days, and that 88.46% of AI citations still traced to pages already in the general search index. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-08; Ahrefs study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-ahrefs-study-llms-txt-files-mostly-unread-by-ai-crawlers/
- **68%** — Share of 584,107 llms.txt files in Common Crawl's July 2026 archive produced by templates or SEO plugins rather than hand-authored — Wix alone accounts for 41% of the corpus, and only about half fully follow the spec's structure of a title, summary line, and link sections. (Common Crawl Blog, 2026-08) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-31-common-crawl-two-thirds-of-llms-txt-files-are-templates/
- **45** — Studies in the first critical survey of generative engine optimization research, 2023–2026 — the discipline now has a literature. (arXiv, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-20-arxiv-survey-maps-generative-engine-optimization-research-2023-2026/
- **16%** — Share of brands that currently track their AI visibility, per the IAB's new "Measuring Visibility in the AI Era" framework — even as more than 20 vendors now sell tools for it. (PPC Land, 2026-08) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-04-iab-sets-first-measurement-standard-for-ai-visibility-tracking-tools/
- **8.90%** — Share of 10,095 live Google Search and Gemini pages carrying detectable generative-engine-optimized content in a GEOFlagBench study — rising to 16.36% among pages modified in 2026; the paper's ModernBERT-based detector reached 0.944 F1 across a 3,200-page benchmark spanning eight GEO optimizer families. (arXiv GEO, 2026-08) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-18-benchmark-flags-geo-optimized-content-in-live-search-results/
- **5.7%** — Maximum relative reduction in attack success rate from three off-the-shelf safety guardrails (Granite Guardian, Llama Guard 3, NeMo Self-Check Fact-Checking) tested against GEO-optimized misinformation in a new Counter-GEO-Bench benchmark of 247 human-verified queries — Granite Guardian's reduction wasn't statistically significant. The guardrails are built to catch policy violations, not fluent, factually wrong text; the authors' own proposed defense, C-GEO Guard, cut attack success by 47.6% relative with near-zero utility loss. (arXiv GEO, 2026-09; arXiv preprint accepted to EMNLP 2026 — the three victim LLMs tested are not named) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-03-new-benchmark-ai-guardrails-miss-most-geo-misinformation-attacks/
- **6.20%** — Attack success rate against generative search systems after GEO Defender — a reranker trained to demote GEO-rewritten documents paired with a training-free source-selection guide — versus 50.32% unprotected, tested across five LLMs and seven GEO attack variants while retaining 94.12% of benign-source usage. (arXiv GEO, 2026-09; arXiv preprint — not yet peer reviewed) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-04-new-defense-cuts-malicious-geo-attack-success-rate-to-6/
- **0%** — Share of JavaScript-only linked pages found by GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Bingbot in a 41-day crawler-discovery test on a 2,400-page site — versus 2% for Googlebot and 48% for Google's separate, JS-capable GoogleOther crawler; converting the links to plain HTML let GPTBot recover 250 previously unreachable pages within 48 hours. (Search Engine Land, 2026-08; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-19-41-day-test-finds-ai-crawlers-miss-javascript-only-links-entirely/
- **35%** — Share of English-language webpages published after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch that showed significant signs of AI authorship in a July 2026 Common Crawl snapshot (10% across all sampled pages) — commercial (.com) domains showed AI-authorship signs at roughly 10 times the rate of .edu or .gov domains (near 1% each), with .org domains at 4.6%, per Pew Research. (Pew Research, 2026-07; AI authorship detected via the Open Pangram classifier — detection accuracy not independently verified) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-20-pew-finds-a-third-of-post-chatgpt-webpages-show-ai-authorship/
- **85.6%** — Share of 4,776 Bali food-service venues that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity failed to recommend across 2,208 queries in a Norly Research market census — having a business website nearly doubled a venue's odds of recommendation, while star rating had no effect on whether a venue appeared at all; the four systems also recommended 14 permanently closed venues a combined 93 times. (PPC Land, 2026-08; Norly Research study — vendor-published, funded and conducted by a review-management/AI-visibility vendor) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-23-ai-assistants-miss-85-6-of-bali-restaurants-in-market-census/
- **81%** — Share of 343 U.S. marketing decision-makers who still refer to their AI search strategy internally as "SEO," with only 27% having formally adopted newer terminology, even as they allocate an average of 24% of search and content budgets to AI search visibility (43% allocating more than a fifth), per a Fractl survey. (Search Engine Land, 2026-08; Fractl study — vendor-published, author is a Fractl co-founder) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-24-survey-81-of-marketers-still-call-ai-search-seo/
- **3%** — Share of the top 20,000 websites currently set up to serve AI agents optimized content formats such as Markdown — 97% aren't, per a BrightEdge audit published alongside its new Agent Edge product, which detects agent requests at the CDN layer and serves a lightweight Markdown version of pages without changing what human visitors see. (BrightEdge Blog, 2026-08; BrightEdge study — vendor-published, audit accompanies its own product launch) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-26-brightedge-launches-agent-edge-to-make-sites-ai-agent-ready/
- **$24.24M** — 30-day transaction volume on x402, the HTTP-402-based agent payment settlement protocol — 75.41M transactions across 94.06K buyers and 22K sellers, per the project's own site, which lists adopters including AWS, Cloudflare, Stripe and Vercel. (x402, 2026-08; self-reported by the project, not independently audited) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-30-acp-ap2-and-x402-are-three-layers-of-one-stack-not-three-rivals/
- **46 of 48** — Major websites that scored zero on agent-transaction protocols like OAuth discovery, the steepest shortfall of 12 machine-readability signals in a SALT.agency audit of 50 sites across retail, SaaS, travel, publishing and finance. Sites averaged 56.6% overall (Airbnb highest at 79.2%), only 11 of 50 had published an llms.txt file, and just 5 of 50 had adopted Cloudflare's Content Signals Policy. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-09; SALT.agency audit — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-01-audit-finds-most-major-websites-aren-t-ai-agent-ready/

## Scale and reach

- **43%** — Share of Google searches surfacing an AI Overview, per a Similarweb analysis. (TechCrunch AI / Similarweb, 2026-07; Similarweb study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-27-ai-overviews-now-appear-in-43-of-google-searches-up-from-15/
- **38% to 57%** — Growth in AI Overview coverage of manufacturing search terms, January to July 2026, per a Semrush analysis of 458 manufacturing keywords, clickstream data and AI citation tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews — a faster rise than the 15% to 43% climb measured across all Google searches over the prior year. AI sources drove under half a percent of manufacturing site traffic against direct and organic search's roughly 80% share. (Semrush Blog, 2026-09; Semrush study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-09-08-semrush-ai-overviews-now-cover-57-of-manufacturing-searches/
- **6.8%** — Share of U.S. ChatGPT desktop queries that included a source citation as of May 2026 — even as citation volume in AI answers overall rose more than fivefold over the year. (TechCrunch AI / Similarweb, 2026-07; Similarweb study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-27-ai-overviews-now-appear-in-43-of-google-searches-up-from-15/
- **15.5%** — Share of U.S. news searches (17.5% in the U.K.) where Google now places the Top Stories carousel inside the AI Overview — meaning publishers who use the Search Console AI opt-out could lose Top Stories placement there too. Google hasn't confirmed the link. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-28-google-s-ai-opt-out-setting-may-cost-publishers-top-stories-placement/
- **95%** — Share of ChatGPT's 494 million users who also used Google search during the same March-to-May 2026 span, per a Similarweb analysis — evidence AI search is layering on top of traditional search, not replacing it. The same analysis found 58.8% of ChatGPT referral traffic lands on publisher homepages even though 65% of the URLs it cites sit two to three folders deep, and that U.S. ad penetration on ChatGPT jumped from 14% in May to 26% in June. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-07; Similarweb study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-07-30-similarweb-95-of-chatgpt-users-also-search-on-google/
- **57.5%** — Share of web traffic that was automated (bot) requests in June 2026, per Cloudflare data cited in IAB Australia's new crawler decision matrix — with 52% of AI crawler requests serving model training versus just 2.6% for live AI-answer queries. (PPC Land, 2026-07) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-01-iab-australia-sorts-ai-crawlers-into-four-access-verdicts/
- **28.1%** — Gen Z consideration of Claude, which nearly doubled from 14.2% to 28.1% between Q1 and Q2 2026 (OpenAI: 10.1% to 22.1%), per YouGov BrandIndex — even as just 28% of Americans overall say they trust AI assistants for answers, a 42-point gap behind trust in traditional search engines. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-08) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-07-gen-z-consideration-for-claude-and-openai-nearly-doubles-yougov-finds/
- **117,000/day** — Daily requests donor-database site PatronView logged from Amazon's Amzn-SearchBot before blocking it in early August 2026, per founder Nick Gray's published server logs — after already blocking Anthropic's Claude-SearchBot in June over a measured 35,000-to-1 ratio of crawls to human-referred visitors; a 48-hour CAPTCHA challenge in the same period drew 106,437 attempts and only 252 solves, a 0.24% rate. (PPC Land, 2026-08; single-source — confirmation pending) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-08-donor-database-site-blocks-amazon-s-ai-crawler-after-logging-117-000/
- **43%** — Trust in Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT among US shoppers, tied for the top score and ahead of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and influencers, though still behind friends and family at 59% — per an RTB House survey of 1,840 US and international consumers. 42% of shoppers said AI tools lengthen their purchase research, but only 35% want to approve a purchase before an AI agent completes it, and millennials' comfort with a $250 autonomous AI spend fell from 42% to 34% once a return guarantee was removed. (PPC Land, 2026-08; RTB House study — vendor-published) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-10-ai-overviews-chatgpt-beat-social-platforms-on-shopper-trust/
- **1B+** — Monthly active users of the Gemini app, which Google calls the fastest-growing product in its history — with 63% of users engaging by voice, over 150 million images generated daily, and more than 100 million active iOS users, per Google's own figures. (Google Keyword Blog, 2026-08; Google-reported figure — not independently verified) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-11-gemini-app-passes-1-billion-monthly-users/
- **15%** — Share of AI page fetchers TollBit tracked in the first half of 2026 that reached European publisher URLs marked disallowed in robots.txt — with OpenAI's ChatGPT-User among the bots most often crossing blocks aimed specifically at it, as OpenAI expands ChatGPT ads into the EEA and Switzerland. (PPC Land / TollBit, 2026-08; TollBit data as cited via PPC Land) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-16-chatgpt-ads-expand-to-europe-as-crawler-bypasses-blocks/
- **600,000** — Unique sources readers have picked as a Google Preferred Source as of August 2026, up from over 345,000 at the feature's May 2026 launch — Google now lets publishers embed a button on their own pages to prompt the pick, and says preferred sources surface more often in Top Stories, AI Overviews and AI Mode. (Google, 2026-08; Google-reported figure — not independently verified) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-20-google-lets-publishers-embed-a-preferred-sources-button/
- **159.1M** — Average monthly EU users the European Commission credits ChatGPT with, the basis for designating it a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act — the third such designation after Google Search (364M) and Bing (119M), both from April 2023, and the first non-traditional search product on the list. (European Commission, 2026-08; Commission-published figure — not independently verified) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-31-eu-designates-chatgpt-a-very-large-online-search-engine/

## How the models work

- **26-34%** — Share of facts frontier LLMs — including Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5 — encode internally but fail to directly recall, per Google research that measured 95-98% encoding rates; reversing a fact's usual subject/object order makes recall harder, and recall failures account for more than 70% of GPT-5.2's errors. Extended "thinking" recovered 40-65% of the otherwise-unrecalled facts. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-08; Google research paper as covered by Search Engine Journal — researchers stop short of confirming a content-phrasing implication) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-17-google-research-entity-order-limits-llm-fact-recall/
- **1.3x** — How much more likely Claude is than ChatGPT to produce an inaccurate brand claim, across more than 158,000 AI-generated brand claims Profound analyzed with its FactCheck tool — overall inaccuracy rates ran 4.3-6.8% across engines. Pricing and billing was the single largest error driver: 12% of claims evaluated but 24% of inaccurate ones, and the top error theme for 66% of brands with at least ten pricing claims checked. (Profound research blog, 2026-08; Profound study — vendor's own product data, not independent research) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-19-claude-answers-are-less-accurate-than-chatgpt-s-study-finds/
- **90%** — Win rate for AI Overviews' generated interfaces over the top organic search result in head-to-head comparisons, per Google's own research paper — though custom-built websites still beat generative UI 50% to 35.3%, and on information-seeking queries generative UI beat the top result 73.5% to 19%, per Search Engine Journal's review. (Search Engine Journal, 2026-08; Google's own research paper — self-reported test results) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-21-google-s-own-tests-show-ai-interfaces-beating-search-results/
- **93% vs. 13%** — Share of responses in which Claude searched the web, versus just 13% for Claude Code — the two products' agents also visited different kinds of pages (Claude Code mostly documentation and pricing pages, Claude mostly robots.txt files, sitemaps and homepages) and shared only about one in five cited brands, per a Profound analysis of 24,135 responses collected July 13-23, 2026. (Profound research blog, 2026-08; Profound study — vendor's own product data, not independent research) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-24-claude-and-claude-code-behave-as-distinct-answer-engines/
- **95.9% vs. 31.2%** — Accuracy of AI answers to branded questions when a platform chose to respond (95.9%) versus how often it declined to answer at all (31.2%), across 1,562 branded prompts and 28,123 responses on six platforms, per a Seer Interactive analysis — Claude was most accurate of any platform when it answered (98%) but had the lowest total accuracy (52.6%) because it declined most often, while AI Mode posted the highest total accuracy (74.2%). On comparative prompts, platforms declined 80.3% of the time and were right only 18.8% of the time they answered. (Seer Interactive, 2026-08; Seer Interactive study — single-brand self-study, not a cross-brand sample) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-08-27-ai-answers-on-brand-questions-are-96-accurate-but-platforms-skip-31/

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From Anything Engine Optimization (AEO Wire) — https://anythingengineoptimization.com/