Every week I see a new “AI is killing SEO” headline with a big scary number in it. Often, when I click through, the number is two years old, comes from a tiny sample, or measures something different from what the headline claims. Business owners then make real budget decisions based on it.
So I built the page I wanted to have myself: a list of AI search statistics where every number has a date and a link to the page it came from. I opened each source before adding it. Where a study has a weakness, I say so.
Let me walk you through the numbers in plain words: how many people use AI search, how often Google shows AI answers, what that does to clicks, how much traffic AI really sends, which sources get cited and what the crawlers are doing. At the end, I explain how to quote these numbers without misleading anyone, including yourself.
How I picked and checked these AI search numbers
I used a few simple rules. They are the same rules I suggest you use for any statistic you put in a pitch deck or a client report.
- I opened every page. No number is copied from another roundup without checking the page it came from.
- Every number has a date. In AI search, a stat from early 2025 can be badly out of date by late 2026.
- I name the sample. “300,000 keywords” and “900 adults” tell you very different things about how far to trust a result.
- I flag who ran the study. Many of the best datasets come from SEO tool companies, including Ahrefs. Their data is large, but they also sell tools, so I keep that in mind.
- I prefer company statements for usage numbers and independent research for behavior numbers.
A good starting point was Ahrefs’ own AI SEO statistics roundup (first published September 1, 2025). I went back to the original studies behind the numbers I used, and added newer ones from 2026 where they exist. If you want to know why a page like this tends to get cited by AI tools, I explain that in my post on why statistics pages earn AI citations.
How many people use AI search tools now
These are the headline usage numbers. They come from company announcements, as reported by TechCrunch, so they are the companies’ own figures.
| Statistic | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users, up from 800 million in October 2025 | Feb 27, 2026 | TechCrunch |
| OpenAI has 50 million paying subscribers | Feb 27, 2026 | TechCrunch |
| Google AI Overviews have 2 billion monthly users, up from 1.5 billion in May 2025, across 200 countries and territories | Jul 23, 2025 | TechCrunch |
| Google AI Mode has over 100 million monthly active users in the US and India | Jul 23, 2025 | TechCrunch |
| The Gemini app has 450 million monthly active users | Jul 23, 2025 | TechCrunch |
| Google said AI Overviews drove over 10% more queries for the types of searches that show them | Jul 23, 2025 | TechCrunch |
One thing to keep in mind: “AI Overview users” counts anyone who saw an AI Overview in Google, even if they didn’t ask for it. It is not the same as people choosing to use an AI tool. That is why the Google number is so much larger than ChatGPT’s.
How often Google shows AI Overviews
This is where dates matter most, because the number moved fast in 2025.
- On March 13, 2025, AI Overviews showed for 7.6% of US keywords in Ahrefs’ tracking. By May 2025, that had grown to 16.48%, and total AI Overviews rose 116% after Google’s March core update (Ahrefs, May 13, 2025, about 25 million US AI Overviews).
- In a sample of 1 million US desktop SERPs, AI Overviews appeared on 3.93% in January 2025 and 27.43% in June 2025 (Ahrefs, July 22, 2025).
- In a much larger sample of 146 million desktop SERPs from September 2025, AI Overviews appeared on 20.5%, about one in five (Ahrefs, November 10, 2025).
The different numbers come from different samples and dates, so don’t compare them as if they were one trend line. What they agree on is that AI Overviews went from rare to common within a year. The same September 2025 study shows which searches trigger them most:
| Type of search (Sept 2025 data) | Share with an AI Overview |
|---|---|
| Question queries | 57.9% |
| Queries of seven or more words | 46.4% |
| Medical YMYL (health) queries | 44.1% |
| Non-branded queries | 24.9% |
| Informational intent | 21.4% |
| Branded queries | 13.1% |
| Single-word queries | 9.5% |
| Local queries | 7.9% |
| Commercial intent | 4.3% |
| Transactional intent | 2.1% |
Source: Ahrefs, November 10, 2025, 146 million SERPs. By category, Science (43.6%) and Health (43.0%) were highest, and Shopping (3.2%) and Real Estate (5.8%) lowest. I go through what this means in my post on what triggers AI Overviews.
What AI answers do to clicks
This is the number business owners care about most. Here are the three studies I trust most, in date order.
Ahrefs’ CTR studies (2025 and 2026)
In April 2025, Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords and found that an AI Overview was linked to a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page, using March 2024 versus March 2025 data (Ahrefs, April 17, 2025).
They re-ran the same method with December 2023 versus December 2025 data, and the drop had grown.
“As of December 2025, AI Overviews reduce the organic click-through rate for position one content by 58%.”
— Ryan Law, Ahrefs, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks (2026 update)
The same February 4, 2026 update broke the drop down by position:
| Organic position | CTR change when an AI Overview is present (Dec 2025) |
|---|---|
| 1 | −58.0% |
| 2 | −50.8% |
| 3 | −46.4% |
| 5 | −32.6% |
| 10 | −19.4% |
Note that this is a correlation from desktop Search Console data, not a controlled experiment. Still, the direction is clear, and the update also lists other studies finding drops of a similar size.
Pew Research Center’s browsing study (2025)
Pew looked at real browsing data from 900 US adults in March 2025, covering 68,879 Google searches. About 18% of those searches showed an AI summary. I read the study through PPC Land’s report of July 23, 2025:
“Google users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits.”
— Pew Research Center, as quoted by PPC Land, AI search summaries reduce link clicks for Google users
- Without an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 15% of visits.
- Users clicked a link inside the AI summary in only about 1% of visits.
- Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, versus 16% without one.
Google’s side of the story
Google doesn’t publish CTR numbers for AI Overviews. Its AI features documentation (last updated December 10, 2025) says that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are “higher quality.” That may be true, but there is no published number behind it. For a deeper look at the click problem and what to do about it, see my post on AI Overviews click loss.
How much traffic AI tools actually send to websites
Here the numbers are much smaller than the hype suggests.
- Across about 35,000 websites, AI sent 0.1% of referral traffic, and Google sent 345 times more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity combined (Ahrefs, March 26, 2025).
- In the same study, sites with fewer than 10,000 visits got about 0.3% of traffic from AI tools, versus 0.1% for sites with over 1 million visits.
- Three months later, across 81,947 websites, AI traffic had grown about 9.7 times in a year but was still only 0.25% of the average site’s traffic. ChatGPT sent more than 80% of it, and Google’s lead had shrunk to 210 times (Ahrefs, June 26, 2025).
- The same June 2025 study found the average site’s search traffic fell about 21% over the year.
- For Ahrefs’ own site, AI search was 0.5% of traffic but 12.1% of signups over 30 days, and AI visitors converted at a 23 times higher rate than organic visitors (Ahrefs, June 16, 2025).
That last stat is from one company selling SEO tools to people who often research them in ChatGPT. I wouldn’t expect a local bakery to see the same result. I treat it as direction, not hard science. To measure your own numbers, follow my guide on tracking AI traffic in GA4, and compare with the AI referral traffic benchmarks I have collected.
Which sources AI answers cite
These numbers tell you where AI tools look for answers, and how closely that matches classic rankings.
| Statistic | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia’s share of citations: ChatGPT 16.3%, Perplexity 12.5%, AI Overviews 8.4% | June 2025 data | Ahrefs, June 11, 2025 |
| YouTube’s share: Perplexity 16.1%, AI Overviews 9.5%; Reddit 7.4% of AI Overview citations | June 2025 data | Ahrefs, June 11, 2025 |
| 76.1% of AI Overview citations rank in Google’s top 10; 14.4% rank below position 100 | Jul 21, 2025 | Ahrefs |
| Only about 12% of URLs cited by AI assistants rank in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt (15,000 prompts) | Aug 11, 2025 | Ahrefs |
| 6.82% of ChatGPT’s cited URLs appear in Google’s top 10 for its fan-out queries; 83.39% don’t appear in Google’s results at all | Aug 20, 2025 | Ahrefs |
| Government sites made up 6% of AI summary sources versus 2% of standard results | Mar 2025 data | Pew via PPC Land, Jul 23, 2025 |
The big lesson here: Google’s AI Overviews mostly cite pages that already rank, while ChatGPT often doesn’t. I explain the reasons in my guide on which search index ChatGPT uses.
AI crawler and bot numbers
Before an AI tool can cite you, its crawler has to read your page. These numbers show how much crawling happens and how little traffic comes back.
- Across about 140 million websites, GPTBot was the most-blocked AI bot in robots.txt at 5.89% of sites. ClaudeBot’s block rate grew fastest, up 32.67% in a year. The number of major AI bots roughly doubled from 10 in August 2023 to 21 in December 2024 (Ahrefs, May 21, 2025).
- Over the 12 months to mid-2025, 80% of AI crawling on Cloudflare’s network was for training, 18% for search and 2% for user actions (Cloudflare, August 29, 2025).
- In July 2025, Cloudflare counted about 1,091 crawls by OpenAI for every visitor it referred back, and 194.8 for Perplexity.
“Even after an 87% decline this year, it still crawled 38,000 pages for every referred page visit in July 2025.”
— João Tomé, Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap (on Anthropic’s crawler)
If you want to decide which bots to allow, my guide to AI crawlers walks through each one.
AI-written content and what gets cited
These figures all come from Ahrefs’ own AI detector, so they share its limits. Detectors give probabilities, not certainty.
- 74.2% of 900,000 new English web pages found in April 2025 contained AI-generated content; 25.8% were classed as pure human (Ahrefs, May 19, 2025).
- 86.5% of pages ranking in Google’s top 20 contained some AI content, with a near-zero correlation (0.011) between AI share and ranking (Ahrefs, July 7, 2025).
- Of 500,000 pages cited in AI Overviews, 87.8% were mixed, 8.6% pure human and 3.6% pure AI (Ahrefs, July 14, 2025).
I look at what this does and doesn’t mean in do AI answers cite AI-written content?
How to cite these AI search numbers without misleading anyone
Here is the process I suggest before any of these numbers goes into a report, proposal or blog post.
- Open the original page. Don’t trust a roundup, including this one, without clicking through.
- Write the date next to the number. “AI Overviews cut position-one CTR by 58% (Ahrefs, Dec 2025 data)” is honest. “AI cuts clicks by 58%” is not.
- Say what was measured. “Share of keywords” and “share of searches” are different. So are “users who saw a feature” and “users who chose a tool.”
- Don’t stack numbers from different studies as if they were one trend. The 16.48%, 27.43% and 20.5% AI Overview figures above come from three different samples.
- Mention who ran the study when it is a vendor, and the sample size when it is small.
- Re-check every quarter. I plan to update this page as new studies come out.
A worked example of using the numbers (hypothetical)
Say a client’s blog gets 10,000 organic clicks a month, and 4,000 of those come from informational keywords that now show AI Overviews, mostly in positions 1 to 3. Using Ahrefs’ December 2025 position figures as a rough guide (−58%, −50.8%, −46.4%), you might model a loss of roughly half of those 4,000 clicks, so about 2,000 clicks. That is an estimate for planning, not a forecast, but it tells you which pages to defend first and how big the gap is.
Questions people ask about AI SEO statistics
How many people use ChatGPT?
OpenAI reported 900 million weekly active users, according to TechCrunch on February 27, 2026.
How much do AI Overviews reduce clicks?
Ahrefs’ February 2026 update found a 58% lower CTR for position one when an AI Overview appears, based on December 2025 data. Pew found users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without one (March 2025 data).
How much traffic does AI search send to websites?
Still very little for most sites. Ahrefs measured about 0.25% of the average site’s traffic in June 2025, with ChatGPT sending more than 80% of it.
How often do AI Overviews appear?
About 20.5% of 146 million US desktop SERPs in September 2025, according to Ahrefs, and far more often for question and long queries.
Are these AI statistics reliable?
They are the best available, but many come from SEO tool vendors and use different samples. Use them with their dates and sample sizes, and treat them as direction.
Turning these AI search numbers into a plan for your site
In brief: AI search is huge in reach, it clearly cuts clicks on informational searches, and it still sends very little direct traffic to most sites. That means you need two goals at once: protect the clicks that still convert and earn mentions in AI answers for the rest.
If you want help working out what these numbers mean for your own traffic, our SEO team can run the analysis on your Search Console data. Request a free quote and we will show you where you are exposed and where you can still grow.
Further reading on AI SEO statistics
- Do AI Assistants Favour Big Brands Less Than Google?
- Why Each AI Assistant Cites Different Sources
- AI-Proof Keywords: Finding Queries AI Answers Can't Fully Satisfy
Sources for these AI SEO statistics
- Ahrefs – AI SEO Statistics (Sept 1, 2025, updated)
- TechCrunch – ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (Feb 27, 2026)
- TechCrunch – Google’s AI Overviews have 2B monthly users (Jul 23, 2025)
- Ahrefs – AI Overviews reduce clicks, 2026 update (Feb 4, 2026)
- Ahrefs – AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5% (Apr 17, 2025)
- PPC Land – Pew study: AI search summaries reduce link clicks (Jul 23, 2025)
- Ahrefs – What triggers AI Overviews, 146M SERPs (Nov 10, 2025)
- Ahrefs – AI Traffic Has Increased 9.7x in the Past Year (Jun 26, 2025)
- Ahrefs – Top 10 most-cited domains in AI assistants (Jun 11, 2025)
- Cloudflare – The crawl-to-click gap (Aug 29, 2025)
- Ahrefs – AI bot block rates (May 21, 2025)
- Google Search Central – AI features and your website (updated Dec 10, 2025)
