AI search
in numbers

Over 40% of young adults (18-34) use AI chatbots as their primary information source.

79% of consumers expect to use AI-powered search within the next 12 months.

ChatGPT surpassed 1 billion weekly active users in early 2025.

87.4% of all AI-referred traffic comes from ChatGPT — the dominant single platform in AI search.

Perplexity processes over 100 million searches per week, making it the second largest AI search platform.

AI Overviews now appear in over 25% of all Google searches globally, reaching billions of users monthly.

60% of all B2B searches end without anyone clicking through to a website.

Even businesses ranking #1 in Google see 30% lower click-through rates due to AI Overviews.

Websites in categories with AI Overviews see an average 25% reduction in organic traffic.

Click-through rate drops to 8% when an AI Overview appears, compared to 15% on a regular SERP.

AI Overviews reduce click-through to source websites by 34.5% on average.

Users arriving from AI citations spend an average of 17 minutes on site, vs. 4 minutes from Google.

AI-referred visitors convert at 14.2% on average, compared to 2.8% from Google organic search — a 5x improvement.

Adobe reported a 693% surge in AI referral traffic during the 2025 holiday season, showing explosive commercial intent.

Only 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT also rank in Google's top 10 — high SEO ranking does not guarantee AI visibility.

Pages with descriptive 5–7 word URLs receive 11.4% more AI citations than pages with short or generic URLs.

AI-referred traffic has grown 527% year over year across tracked websites.

84% of digital marketers are aware of Generative Engine Optimization as a discipline.

62% of B2B buyers use AI to research suppliers before making first contact with a vendor.

Gartner predicts a 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by 2026 as AI assistants take share.