AI search and GEO statistics
Numbers for people writing about AI search, with the source, data period and publication date next to every figure. Updated monthly.
Last reviewed: 2026-11-02
AI search adoption
How many people now get answers from AI assistants and AI search surfaces.
- 800M+
People use ChatGPT every week.
Stated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at DevDay, October 6, 2025.
Source: TechCrunch · published 2025-10-06
- 2B
Monthly users of Google AI Overviews, available in 200 countries and territories.
Alphabet Q2 2025 earnings call, July 2025 (up from 1.5B in May 2025).
Source: TechCrunch · published 2025-07-23
- 1B+
Monthly active users of Google AI Mode.
Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks by Sundar Pichai, July 22, 2026.
Source: Google (The Keyword) · published 2026-07-22
- 950M
Monthly active users of the Gemini app; daily active users tripled over the past year.
Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings remarks, July 22, 2026.
Source: Google (The Keyword) · published 2026-07-22
Clicks and zero-click answers
What happens to traffic when an AI summary answers the question on the results page.
- 8% vs 15%
Share of Google visits where users clicked a traditional result: 8% when an AI summary appeared, 15% when it did not.
Browsing data of 900 U.S. adults, March 1–31, 2025.
Source: Pew Research Center · published 2025-07-22
- 1%
Share of visits to pages with an AI summary in which users clicked a link inside the summary itself.
Same Pew study, March 2025.
Source: Pew Research Center · published 2025-07-22
- −58%
Lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview is present.
300,000 keywords, December 2025 compared with December 2023.
Source: Ahrefs · published 2026-02-04
AI-referred shopping
AI assistants are becoming a shopping entry point, and the traffic they send behaves differently.
- +693.4%
Year-over-year growth in traffic from generative AI tools to U.S. retail sites over the 2025 holiday season.
Adobe Analytics, November 1 – December 31, 2025.
Source: Adobe · published 2026-01
- +31%
AI-referred visits converted 31% more than other traffic sources.
Adobe Analytics, 2025 holiday season.
Source: Adobe · published 2026-01-12
- Sep 29, 2025
ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout, letting U.S. users buy from Etsy sellers in chat, built on the open Agentic Commerce Protocol co-developed with Stripe.
OpenAI announcement; Shopify merchants announced as coming soon.
Source: OpenAI · published 2025-09-29
AI crawlers
AI platforms read far more pages than they send visitors back to.
- 70,900 : 1
Anthropic crawl-to-referral ratio: HTML pages crawled per HTML page referral. Ratios across AI platforms ranged down to 0.1 : 1 (Mistral).
Cloudflare network data, June 19–26, 2025. Cloudflare notes the Claude app sends no Referer header, so the ratio may be overstated.
Source: Cloudflare · published 2025-07-01
GEOly research
For our own analysis of which domains AI engines cite, read the citation study based on 212,156 AI citations.
How this page is maintained
We include a figure only when the original publisher or a report quoting the original statement can be linked. Each figure keeps the period and sample stated by its source; we do not extrapolate. Figures are reviewed monthly and replaced when a newer edition is published.
Citing this page
Cite the original source linked next to each figure. To cite this collection, use: "AI Search & GEO Statistics, GEOly, reviewed 2026-11-02, https://www.geoly.ai/geo-statistics".