Research
AI search statistics 2026
Here are the numbers people quote about AI search, and where each one really comes from. Every number links to its source and says when it was measured.
Three numbers to start with
ChatGPT and OpenAI
How many people use ChatGPT, and what they use it for.
1.2 billion
People using ChatGPT every week
OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said on stage at OpenAI's developer event that 1.2 billion people now use ChatGPT every week.
OpenAI's own number, reported live by Engadget. Nobody outside OpenAI has checked it.
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Source: Engadget, OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog900 million
ChatGPT weekly users and paying subscribers
OpenAI said 900 million people used ChatGPT each week, and 50 million of them paid for a subscription.
Announced by OpenAI and reported by TechCrunch. OpenAI's own post blocked our checker, so we link to the report.
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Source: TechCrunch, ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users800 million
ChatGPT weekly users one year earlier
At OpenAI's developer event the year before, Sam Altman said ChatGPT had 800 million weekly users.
A statement by the CEO, reported by TechCrunch. Useful to see the growth, not a current number.
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Source: TechCrunch, Sam Altman says ChatGPT has hit 800M weekly active users18 billion
Messages sent to ChatGPT every week
People sent 18 billion messages to ChatGPT every week. They came from 700 million weekly users, about one in ten adults on Earth.
From a research paper by OpenAI and economists at Harvard and Duke. It counts the consumer plans, not business accounts.
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Source: OpenAI, Harvard and Duke economists (NBER working paper), How People Use ChatGPT2.6 billion
ChatGPT messages per day
ChatGPT received about 451 million messages a day in June 2024. In June 2025 it was 2.6 billion.
Same research paper. Consumer plans only.
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Source: OpenAI, Harvard and Duke economists (NBER working paper), How People Use ChatGPT49%
Why people message ChatGPT
About 49% of messages ask for information or advice. 40% ask ChatGPT to make something, like a text or code. 11% are people sharing thoughts or feelings.
Same research paper. Asking is the part that looks most like search.
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Source: OpenAI, Harvard and Duke economists (NBER working paper), How People Use ChatGPT24%
ChatGPT used to look things up
Messages that look for information grew from 14% of all use in July 2024 to 24% in July 2025.
Same research paper. This is the closest measured number for ChatGPT used as a search engine.
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Source: OpenAI, Harvard and Duke economists (NBER working paper), How People Use ChatGPT
Google: AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini
Google's AI features reach more people than any chatbot. Most of these numbers come from Google itself.
1 billion
Google AI Mode monthly users
Google's CEO said AI Mode in Google Search has passed 1 billion monthly users, and that it adds searches on top of normal ones.
Google's own number, from its earnings call. These are monthly users, so don't compare them with ChatGPT's weekly users.
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Source: Google (Alphabet), Q2 2026 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO950 million
Gemini app monthly users
The Gemini app has 950 million monthly users, Google says. The number of people who use it every day tripled in a year.
Google's own numbers, from its earnings call.
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Source: Google (Alphabet), Q2 2026 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO750 million
Gemini app monthly users a few months earlier
At the previous big update, Google reported over 750 million monthly users for the Gemini app.
Google's own number. Compare it with the card above to see how fast the app grew.
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Source: Google (Alphabet), Q4 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO2 billion
People who see AI Overviews each month
AI Overviews, the AI summaries at the top of Google results, had over 2 billion monthly users in more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages.
Google's own number. Google hasn't published a newer one, so it is older than the rest of this section.
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Source: Google (Alphabet), Q2 earnings call: CEO's remarks100 million
Google AI Mode users at the start
A year earlier, AI Mode had over 100 million monthly users, and only in the US and India.
Google's own number. Useful to see how fast AI Mode grew.
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Source: Google (Alphabet), Q2 earnings call: CEO's remarks10%
Extra Google use where AI Overviews show
In big markets like the US and India, Google says people use Google over 10% more for the kinds of searches that show AI Overviews.
Google's own claim, without published data behind it.
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Source: Google, AI Overviews are now available in over 200 countries and territories, and more than 40 languages
Clicks and zero-click searches
Do AI answers take clicks away from websites? Independent measurements and Google's own view, side by side.
8%
Clicks on normal results, with and without an AI summary
When Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a normal search result in 8% of visits. Without a summary they did so in 15% of visits.
Pew Research Center followed the real browsing of 900 US adults who agreed to share it: 68,879 Google searches in one month.
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Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results1%
Clicks on links inside the AI summary
People clicked a link inside Google's AI summary in just 1% of the visits that showed one.
Same Pew study. The summary itself sends very few visitors.
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Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results18%
Google searches that showed an AI summary
18% of the Google searches in Pew's study showed an AI summary.
Same Pew study, US only. Other studies count differently, see the Semrush card below.
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Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results26%
Searches after which people stopped browsing
After a page with an AI summary, people ended their browsing session 26% of the time. Without a summary it was 16%.
Same Pew study. It suggests the summary often answers the question.
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Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results88%
AI summaries that cite several sources
88% of the AI summaries cited 3 or more sources.
Same Pew study.
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Source: Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results58.5%
Google searches that end without a click
58.5% of Google searches in the US and 59.7% in the EU ended without a click.
SparkToro analysed clickstream panels from Datos, a company that sells clickstream data.
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Source: SparkToro and Datos, 2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 US Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the EU, it’s 360.58%
Lower click rate for the top result
For keywords with an AI Overview, the number one result had a 58% lower click rate on desktop than comparable keywords without one. With an AI Overview it fell from 7.3% in December 2023 to 1.6% in December 2025. Without one it fell from 7.6% to 3.9%.
A study by Ahrefs, an SEO tool company, on 300,000 keywords with desktop data from Search Console. It shows a link, not proof that AI Overviews caused the drop.
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Source: Ahrefs, Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%Statement
What Google says about clicks
Google's head of Search wrote that the total number of clicks from Google to websites has stayed relatively stable compared with a year earlier, and that clicks have become higher quality.
Google's claim. The post shares no data, so we show it next to Pew's measurement.
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Source: Google, AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicksStatement
Clicks from Google's AI features
Google's CEO said AI features in Search now send billions of clicks to websites every week.
Google's claim, without an exact number.
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Source: Google (Alphabet), Q2 2026 earnings call: Remarks from our CEO
Who uses AI search
Surveys of real people in the US and Europe.
44%
US adults who say they use ChatGPT
44% of US adults say they use ChatGPT, up from 34% a year earlier.
Pew Research Center survey. This time the question also mentioned other chatbots, so the two years were not asked in exactly the same way.
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Source: Pew Research Center, The share of Americans who say they use ChatGPT has more than doubled since 202334%
US adults who have ever used ChatGPT
34% of US adults had used ChatGPT, including 58% of adults under 30.
Pew Research Center survey of 5,123 US adults.
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Source: Pew Research Center, 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, about double the share in 202333%
People in the EU who used AI tools like ChatGPT
33% of people aged 16 to 74 in the EU used generative AI tools in the previous 3 months. Among 16 to 24 year olds it was 64%, among 65 to 74 year olds just 7%.
Eurostat, the EU statistics office, from its yearly survey. Find your country in the table below.
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Source: Eurostat, Use of artificial intelligence by individuals10%
People who use AI chatbots for news every week
10% of people use AI chatbots for news every week, up from 7% a year earlier. Among people under 35 it is 16%.
Reuters Institute survey of 97,520 people in 48 countries and regions.
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Source: Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, Digital News Report 2026: executive summary20%
Trust in answers from AI chatbots
20% of people trust answers from AI chatbots. For news in general it is 37%.
Reuters Institute, same survey. Trust differs a lot between countries.
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Source: Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, Digital News Report 2026: executive summary42%
Chatbot news users who click through
42% of people who use chatbots for news say they always or often click through to the original source.
Reuters Institute, same survey. This is what people say they do, which can differ from what they actually do.
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Source: Reuters Institute, University of Oxford, Digital News Report 2026: executive summary22
Safari searches went down for the first time
Apple's Eddy Cue told a US court that searches in Safari went down for the first time in 22 years. He said more people use AI instead.
Sworn testimony, reported by Fortune. Google answered the same day that its total searches, including from Apple devices, are still growing.
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Source: Fortune, Searches on Safari dipped for the first time in 22 years, Apple's Eddy Cue admits
| Country | Share |
|---|---|
| Norway | 56% |
| Denmark | 48% |
| Finland | 46% |
| Netherlands | 45% |
| Sweden | 42% |
| Portugal | 39% |
| Spain | 38% |
| France | 38% |
| Germany | 32% |
| EU average | 33% |
* Norway is not in the EU but takes part in the same survey.
Eurostat database (June 5, 2026)Market share and referral traffic
Which search engines and chatbots send visitors to websites.
76.85%
ChatGPT's lowest share of chatbot traffic
In April 2026, ChatGPT's share of chatbot visits to websites fell to 76.85%, its lowest on record. In April 2025 it was 84.21%. Gemini grew from 2.31% to 9% in that year.
StatCounter press release. The other chatbots are slowly catching up.
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Source: StatCounter, ChatGPT falls to all-time low as AI chatbot referral market continues to fragment
AI crawlers and robots.txt
AI bots read websites to train models and to answer questions. Here is how much they crawl and how many sites block them.
1,091:1
Pages AI bots crawl for every visitor they send
For every visit OpenAI sent back to a website, its bots crawled about 1,091:1 pages. Anthropic: 38,066:1. Perplexity: 195:1. Microsoft: 41:1. Google: 5.4:1.
Measured on Cloudflare's network in one month. Cloudflare sells tools to block or charge AI bots, so this is a company study.
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Source: Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals80%
Why AI bots crawl websites
80% of AI crawling collected training data for AI models, 18% was for search and 2% was to do something a user asked.
Cloudflare's network, over twelve months.
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Source: Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap: Cloudflare data on AI bots, training, and referrals500,000:1
Highest crawl-to-visit ratios
At its peak, Anthropic crawled up to 500,000:1 pages for every visitor it sent. OpenAI peaked at 3,700:1 in March 2025.
Cloudflare Radar. These ratios swing a lot when a bot sends very few visitors.
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Source: Cloudflare Radar, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review15×
Growth of AI bots that act for a user
Visits by AI bots that fetch a page because a user asked something grew more than 15× during the year.
Cloudflare Radar. The report text also mentions a bigger number; we use the more careful headline.
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Source: Cloudflare Radar, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in ReviewStatement
The most blocked bots
GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot are the bots that robots.txt files most often block completely.
Cloudflare Radar. A robots.txt file tells bots which pages they may visit.
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Source: Cloudflare Radar, The 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review18%
Growth of crawling by search and AI bots
Crawling by search and AI bots grew 18% from May 2024 to May 2025. GPTBot's share went from 2.2% to 7.7%, and Googlebot's requests grew 96%.
Cloudflare's network.
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Source: Cloudflare, From Googlebot to GPTBot: who's crawling your site in 20254.5%
Websites that name AI bots in robots.txt
GPTBot is named in the robots.txt of 4.5% of websites, up from 2.9% a year earlier. ClaudeBot: 3.6%. Google-Extended: 3.4%. PerplexityBot: 2.8%.
HTTP Archive Web Almanac, desktop sites in its yearly crawl. Naming a bot often means blocking it, but not always.
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Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, Web Almanac 2025: SEO chapter2.13%
Websites with an llms.txt file
Only 2.13% of desktop sites and 2.1% of mobile sites have a valid llms.txt file. On mobile alone that is 324,184 files. 39.6% of the files were made by the All in One SEO plugin.
HTTP Archive Web Almanac. llms.txt is a new, optional file that describes a site for AI tools.
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Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac, Web Almanac 2025: SEO chapter569 million
AI crawler visits in one month
In one month, GPTBot fetched 569 million pages on Vercel's network. Claude's crawler fetched 370 million and PerplexityBot 24.4 million. None of the big AI crawlers ran JavaScript.
Vercel, a hosting company, with MERJ. An older study: text that only appears after JavaScript runs may be invisible to these bots.
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Source: Vercel and MERJ, The rise of the AI crawler
Copilot, Meta AI and Perplexity
Other assistants that answer questions with information from the web.
150 million
Microsoft Copilot monthly users
Microsoft's family of Copilot apps passed 150 million monthly users. Its AI features across all products had 900 million monthly users.
Microsoft's earnings call. The second number counts AI features inside many products, not one chatbot.
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Source: Microsoft, Microsoft FY26 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call (transcript)1 billion
Meta AI monthly users
Meta AI had 1 billion monthly users across Meta's apps, Mark Zuckerberg said.
Reported by TechCrunch. It counts use inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, so don't compare it with standalone chat apps.
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Source: TechCrunch, Meta AI now has 1B monthly active users780 million
Perplexity questions per month
Perplexity received 780 million questions in May 2025, its CEO said, and was growing more than 20% a month.
A statement by the CEO, reported by TechCrunch. Not audited, and we found no newer official number.
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Source: TechCrunch, Perplexity received 780 million queries last month, CEO says
Our own data
We also measure websites ourselves. Our GEO score rates how ready a homepage is for AI search, from 0 to 100, based on 22 checks.
Popular websites worldwide
In June 2026 we measured 3,982 homepages, mostly of popular websites from the Tranco list. The average GEO score was 48.6. 96.2% scored below 70, and only 3 reached 80 or more.
60.4% of these homepages had no structured data (schema.org) at all.
Dutch and German websites
From July 2, 2026 to September 30, 2026 we measured 116,328 homepages, mostly Dutch- and German-language sites from the Curlie web directory. The average GEO score was 49.3, and 98.4% scored below 70.
Dutch sites (36,553) averaged 51.7 and 55.9% had no structured data. German sites (76,273) averaged 48.1 and 63.8% had no structured data.
These are two different groups of websites, measured with different versions of our crawler. Don't read the difference as a trend.
We only check homepages. The score measures signals on the page, not how often AI tools actually cite a site.
The full numbers
- State of GEO report, second quarter
- State of GEO report, third quarter
- How many websites use schema.org
- How we measure
- Download the data (CSV)
Numbers from our database, read on October 20, 2026.
Sample sites partly from the Curlie directory. With content from Curlie.org - the largest human-edited directory of the web. Contribute by submitting a website or becoming an editor. Curlie data is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Numbers we don't use (and why)
You will find these numbers on other pages. We left them out because we could not trace them, or because they are out of date.
"AI Overviews show in 25-48% of Google searches"
We found no study with this range. The figures we could check measure other keyword sets.
"ChatGPT handles 1 billion queries a week"
No source. OpenAI's own research counts messages, not queries, and reports far more.
"ChatGPT has 200 million weekly users"
A number from 2024. It is long out of date.
"Perplexity handles over 1 billion queries a month"
We found no statement from Perplexity. The last official number is from May 2025.
"AI Overviews appear on over 30% of all search results"
No source. Measured shares depend heavily on which keywords a study uses.
"Search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026" (Gartner)
A prediction from 2024, not a measurement. We could not open the original press release, and Google reports more searches, not fewer.
"Only 4% click through from chatbot answers"
It contradicts the Reuters Institute report it is said to come from.
"AI Overviews have 1.5 billion monthly users"
An early 2025 number. Google later reported over 2 billion.
Keep learning
Changes
- : Page published. 44 numbers checked against their sources, plus our own data.
How to cite this page
Please cite the original source of each number, linked on its card. To cite this overview:
GEO-Score (2026). AI search statistics 2026. Retrieved from https://geo-score.online/research/ai-search-statistics-2026
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